Comment by gsvclass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gsvclass | Hacker News Reader

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GraphJin DOES NOT hook GraphQL straight to a DB. It is a backend service which in DEV mode saves queries to an allow list and in production on queries from this list are allowed to be run. GraphQL does not mean clients are allowed to change the query willy nilly in production that would be a nightmare.

Also in production the query is compiled into a db prepared statement the first time and then on queries after validation go directly to the prepared statement. This is no different than a hand written HTTP endpoint + ORM.

Addition if using the standalone service is not for you then you can use GraphJin as sort of an ORM within your own http handlers.

The question around why use it is complex. Some reasons even nested queries and mutations are compiled to a single SQL query. Knowledge of indexes is used to write a fast query. Support for things like joining again Postgres Array columns, JSON columns, fast cursor pagination, Graph queries using recursive CTEs, full-text search and a lot more out of the box and will work on Postgres, Mysql, Cockroach, Yugabyte and I'm working on more.

> GraphJin DOES NOT hook GraphQL straight to a DB. It is a backend service which in DEV mode saves queries to an allow list and in production on queries from this list are allowed to be run. GraphQL does not mean clients are allowed to change the query willy nilly in production that would be a nightmare.

Thats "straight to a db" by my definition. But I agree that saved/allowlisted queries are a key problem that needs to be solved in any prod environment, regardless of tooling you are using.

I'm not saying there isn't a use case for it, but I think there is a better solution 100% of the time. I am clearly not the target audience for this though, so my opinion is kind of irrelevant.

In my world graphql is a tool for aggregating microservices in to a supergraph, when you are at a point that a monolithic DB (or a couple of them) with data from lots of different domains no longer exists. In that sort of environment, which is an extremely common use case for gql, doing this to expose your domain data in a graph breaks microservice isolation patterns and directly ties your domain contracts to internal datamodels; both of which are almost always bad long-term.

If the problem you are trying to solve is "spend less time building http endpoints for CRUD apps", then something like graphjin is a win, but I'd argue it not a pattern you'll want to use forever. If you are using graphql to aggregate cross domain services in a large engineering organization, this is a bad idea.

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