Thank you @carlgnash -- Your input was very helpful in that a light bulb went off after reading your posts, that caused me to re-read the whitepaper with a different angle of understanding.

I'm about to run a marketing contest that seeks to test some of the communications that a business might employ. The proceeds for the post will be donated back. I'm going to need to run a SQL query on the chain to test the number of resteems and the transaction time. Is this something you might want to do, or should I contact @curie ?

Thanks,