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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... There's this big, great, 'perfect', heavyweight graph query language (GQL) that is on process of standardized while an alternative (GraphQL) language is more readable (much more lightweight syntax IMO), has gained much more traction, etc...

While GQL and GraphQL's target is different(one is for interacting with Graph DBs while the other one is interacting with backends), there is a lot of overlap ongoing, and I just can't erase the feeling of the overlap between XML & JSON (where while XML was more 'perfect', JSON won the war).

Edit: Ok, GraphQL is insufficient for GraphDB Querying. Thanks for everyone's clarification.

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> while an alternative (GraphQL) language is more readable

It's also entirely insufficient. GraphQL is nice to query APIs but almost pointless to query databases unless you map an entire DSL on top of it.

GraphQL has nothing to do with graph databases.

Why? GraphQL is about modeling business domain objects in graphs [0] and querying them. Isn't that basically what Graph DB languages do too?

[0] https://graphql.org/learn/thinking-in-graphs/

It is a query language for APIs, name like RestQL or JsonQL would be much more suitable.

The expressiveness of GraphQL is severely limited, it doesn't allow you to express even simple patterns like triangles, depth n, paths etc..

aside from google search results for GQL :)

https://dgraph.io/

I think linking to dgraph may actually support "has nothing to do with". DGraph's query language was inspired by graphql but it also explicitly diverged from it in order to make a more suitable db language.

Exactly. GraphQL solves the same problem as REST. It is not a graph query language despite its unfortunate name.

Not to muddy the waters here, but you can use GraphQL to build APIs with graph databases like Neo4j. There are integrations that use GraphQL type definitions to define the database data model, translate GraphQL queries to Cypher, and extend the expressiveness of GraphQL by mapping Cypher queries to GraphQL fields:

https://grandstack.io/docs/guide-graphql-schema-design.html

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