This would be a much bigger conversation, the SQLite efforts are very cool. Short answer to your question is that the API load should be fine (I regularly down

This would be a much bigger conversation, the SQLite efforts are very cool. Short answer to your question is that the API load should be fine (I regularly download large subsets of the database myself via the API for research purposes), although there are good and bad ways of writing API queries. We have some tutorials, workshops, etc. available to help newcomers to our API write good queries. We also have an email address set up (heavy.api.use@materialsproject.org) where people can give us a heads up if they are concerned about putting an undue load on our servers; as much as we try to have reasonable automatic limits set, sometimes we have had issues! API traffic continues to grow too, which in some ways is a nice problem to have, but does mean this is a moving target.