Comment by kall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kall | Hacker News Reader

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In [3] it says "we are assessing the code complexity and performance of a simple IMDb-like website built with Loopback, TypeORM, Sequelize, Prisma, Hasura, Postgraphile, raw SQL, and EdgeDB" but then it goes on to only explain the results of the classic ORMs but not hasura, postgraphile and prisma. Are the full results available somewhere?

That classic ORMs are kinda slow is probably not a surprise to anyone, the others which either get to compile the full query or have a hand in controlling the schema are more interesting.

They also seem more similar to your product, running as a server and managing the schema, so most worth comparing.

Edit: The fact that "Raw SQL" ends up being a suboptimal query because of the node driver limitations, which then gives you "Way faster than even raw SQL!!!" graphs also leaves a weird taste. I guess if you are comparing programming language level solutions fair enough.

We'll post some benchmarks against Hasura et al soon.

"Faster than SQL" is, of course, relative and depends on "what SQL"? EdgeQL compiles into a single query that uses PostgreSQL-specific features. This is a guarantee. No matter how large or complex your query is, if it compiles, it compiles into a single SQL query. Manually written or ORM-generated SQL tends to be "multi-query" due to the whole "standard SQL composes badly" story. And this matters, because if the roundtrip network latency between the client and the server is 10ms, EdgeQL will get you a response in ~10ms, whereas a multi-query approach will in (~10ms X <number-of-queries>) even if every individual query is super-quick to compute.

Would love to see benchmarks! :)

But just for clarity in the discussion thread here, Hasura also compiles to a single query when only Postgres is being hit and I'd expect performance to be quite similar...

Ofcourse, if the GraphQL query requires federation across multiple Postgres databases or multiple databases or databases + other GraphQL / REST APIs, then Hasura breaks them up into multiple queries with a worst-case performance of a data-loader type set up.

Yeah, compiling a data access DSL down to SQL, potentially through some intermediate AST, is not as novel as it's being made to sound around here. I feel like I'm being gaslighted.

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