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Comment by RVuRnvbM2e | Hacker News Reader

That backend engineer wrote a single SQL query that joined some tables, ensured indices were used, and always executed in <1ms.

In graphql land you'd be doing multiple SQL queries, "joining" in the API layer, and spending 50ms per API call.

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The entire point of graphql servers is that they're basically ORMs (or use an underlying ORM) that turn complex nesting into a single query's worth of joins. It won't beat hand-crafted sql from an expert, but if that's your preferred approach, debates on the relative merits of different query frameworks are all academic to you anyway.

I've never seen this kind of graphql server implementation that can automatically boil down a complex nested query to sensible SQL. It sounds like the best of both worlds. Do you have links?

Typically libraries use a Dataloader + ORM to implement this which gets you pretty far, outside of that some libs like Strawberry with automatically optimize your queries for you if you return Django ORM Querysets.

Any query you were going to build and serve with Rest can be made with these two methods or even a raw dataloader and manual SQL string.

The inventors of GraphQL did not intend it to be mapped directly to a database.

"That would be one way to implement the system in a DB-centric way. However we believe that intermediate application code is pretty critical to any GraphQL implementation." [1]

"GraphQL is a client-server dance that needs server-side capabilities, not just CRUD semantics." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879870

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14351800

The Language Libs like Strawberry implement what he is describing by intermediate application code. It doesn't map directly to a database.

GQL implementations don't map to the database but to application code.

Specifically, GQL implementations always map to a `resolve(source, args, context, info)` function (the names can be anything, the types are what matter). In that sense, you also get a standard server interface similar to wsgi/psgi/rack, but much more fine-grained (there can be a resolver for every field in the query).

Symfony API Platform boils to ORM-generated SQL via Doctrine, which is verbose, but not overly clever. So the only link I could give you there would be to the Doctrine query builder docs (I won't subject you to API Platform's docs). I imagine a more sophisticated graphql dialect like what Prisma supports can generate some pretty gnarly sql, but that's ORMs for you. But exposing your data model directly through graphql is also not recommended, same with REST APIs (I can't claim the high ground, my biggest graphql project exposes models directly. The tradeoff was worth it in this case). So in the end you're writing custom controllers/resolvers anyway, and field resolvers are where graphql really starts to shine.

What? GraphQL is purpose built to solve that in 1 Query. Not doing it in 1 query is on you not the protocol.

In practice with REST the frontend engineer didn't want to wait and tried to use the existing REST endpoints, did N+1 API HTTPS calls and then joined them client side in javascript.

A lot of graphql implementation end up moving the n+1 problem to the query resolver.

Every GQL implementation I have seen explicitly has a way to avoid n+1 queries.

> What? GraphQL is purpose built to solve that in 1 Query. Not doing it in 1 query is on you not the protocol.

1 graphql query maybe. But that translated to a dozen SQL queries.

> In practice with REST the frontend engineer didn't want to wait and tried to use the existing REST endpoints, did N+1 API HTTPS calls and then joined them client side in javascript.

The point you're missing is that for 1 graphql query the API did N+1 SQL queries, and then also joined them in JavaScript.

In the REST case the front end can switch to the efficient custom endpoint when it is implemented. In the graphql case it will never get any faster because the API has to stay generic.

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