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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree. I've posted about this before in discussions about Hasura, but I feel that all these "expose your DB as a GraphQL endpoint" are setting themselves up for a world of hurt down the road.

GraphQL is a fantastic tool to enable an API that maps extremely closely to the front end (check the spec, that is exactly what it was intended to do); instead building it so it exactly matches your DB schema is a huge mistake IMO.

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Two points, if your DB schema doesn't model your domain correctly you're doing it wrong to start with. And two, views are typically used to decouple the raw database tables from whatever you want to expose to others, be those other developers or in this case external API users.

Modelling databases this way has fallen out of favour for various reasons, but it becomes extremely useful and relevant again with systems like Hasura.

What's the problem with views?

You can't insert/update/delete data in views in all cases, and they can make debugging performance more challenging, but otherwise nothing. I think they are underused.

I rarely see people using views at all, let alone using them as a test aid (composing big queries from smaller more easily tested views), or using them to define interfaces to an internal data model.

For the most part, you can insert/update/delete.

See: INSTEAD OF triggers.

That is unless you're using MySQL/MariaDB, in which case views are the least of your worries.

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