edgedb VS Hasura

A new DB, with a new query language that's like "SQL done right"? This immediately reminded me of EdgeDB: https://edgedb.com/

Is there anyone here who knows enough about these two products to do a compare/contrast?

The whole thing consists of these main parts:

1. SQL parser: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/tree/master/edb/pgsql/parse...

>relational no-sql

Do you mean something like edgeDB?[0]

Or do you mean some non-declarative language completely? I don't see the latter making much sense. The issue with SQL for me is the "natural language" which quickly loses all intended readabilty when you have SELECT col1, col2 FROM (SELECT * FROM ... WHERE 1=0 AND ... which is what edgeDB is trying to solve.

[0]https://edgedb.com/

We need to land #3747, then something like this should work

You have to do your own optimiser to avoid, for instance, the N+1 query problem. (Just Google that, plenty of explanations around.) Many GraphQL frameworks have a “naive” subquery implementation that performs N individual subqueries. You either have to override this for each parent/child pairing, or bolt something on the back to delay all the “SELECT * FROM tbl_subquery WHERE id = ?” operations and convert them into one “… WHERE id IN (…)”. Sounds like a great use of your time.

In the end you might think to yourself “why am I doing this, when my SQL database already has query optimisation?”. And it’s a fair question, you are onto it. Try one of those auto-GraphQL things instead. EdgeDB (https://edgedb.com) does it as we speak, runs atop Postgres. Save yourself the enormous effort if you’re only building a GraphQL API for a single RBDMS, and not as a façade for a cluster of microservices and databases and external requests.

Or just nod to your boss and go back to what being a backend developer has always meant: laboriously building by hand completely ad hoc JSON versions of SQL RBDMS schemas, each terribly unhappy in its own way. In no way does doing it manually but presenting GraphQL deviate from this Sisyphean tradition.

I read in the article that NOT having GraphQL exactly match your DB schema is a best practice. My response is “did a backend developer write this?”

Same idea, yeah. Unfortunately, in our case we couldn't use pytest due to complicated test setup, so we used a customized unittest runner instead.

EdgeDB [1] has indeed a rich GraphQL layer, but it's a very different project.

While it also builds on top of Postgres, EdgeDB replaces the entire relational database front-end. EdgeDB features a SQL replacement language called EdgeQL (analytical capabilities of SQL married with deep-fetching in GraphQL), a higher-level data model (tables -> object types), integrated migrations engine, a custom protocol with great performance & great client APIs, and many other things. Read more here [2].

(disclaimer: I'm EdgeDB co-founder)

[1] https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb

[2] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-1-0

I'm curious how this squares up with what someone linked elsewhere: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/discussions/3403

> EdgeDB does not treat Postgres as a simple standard SQL store. The opposite is true. To realize the full potential of the graph-relational model and EdgeQL efficiently, we must squeeze every last bit of functionality out of PostgreSQL's implementation of SQL and its schema.

This would seem to be an opposing view of how coupled EdgeDB and PostgreSQL are. Which is it?

> 2. ORMs do not hide SQL nastiness.

This is certainly true!

I mean: ORMs are now well known to "make the easy queries slightly more easy, while making intermediate queries really hard and complex queries impossible".

I think the are of ORMs is over. It simply did not deliver.

If a book on SQL is --say-- 100 pages, a book on Hibernate is 400 pages. So much to learn just to make the easy queries slightly easier to type? Just not worth it.

I prefer jooq any day over ORMs. And dont get me started over what tools like Hasuna have to offer.

There are also some languages (forgot the names) that are SQL-done-right. Select in the back, more type safe, more logic, more in the same steps as the query gets executed. These need to be adopted by PG and MySQL and we're good to go. (IMHO)

https://www.jooq.org/

https://hasura.io/

[4] https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/architecture/live-queries.md

Another strategy is to model access control declaratively and enforce it in the application layer. ZenStack (built above Prisma ORM) and Hasura are good examples of this approach. The following code shows how access policies are defined with ZenStack and how a secured CRUD API can be derived automatically.

Today, this ecosystem is going strong with new providers like Hasura, AppWrite and Supabase powering millions of projects. There are a few reasons people choose this style of hosting, especially if they are more comfortable with frontend development. BaaS lets them set up a database in a secure way, expose some business logic on top of the data, and connect via a dev-friendly SDK from their app or website code to save data easily. These modern tools build a blend of managed database with curated plugins such as authentication, great admin dashboards, and function as a service type capability - all in one package, and often offered as a integrated hosted service.

Hi! If you’ve ever thought about something like using GraphQL for something like this.. You might like Hasura. (Obligatory I work for Hasura)

We’ve got an OpenAPI import and you can setup cron-jobs or one-off jobs and do things like load in headers from the environment variables to pass through. There isn’t currently an easy journey for chaining multiple calls together without writing any code at all, but you can wrap pretty much any API endpoint via OpenAPI import or a custom action, and you can even make minor edits to things like the API contract format to change aliases/naming.

Our goal is to join all the things, databases and API’s. Most people know us for instant GraphQL API’s that give you CRUD on your database, but we also wrap APIs.

Not sure if something like this would fit your use-case and do check out some of the other things mentioned, but depending what you are trying to do I think Hasura might potentially work.

You can find out more here: https://hasura.io

Nested Mutation - 113 thumbs up, and still open since 2019... another case of not listening to the users?

Hasura is an open-source real-time GraphQL API server with a strong authorization layer on your database. You can subscribe to database events via webhooks. It can combine multiple API servers into one unified graphQL API. Hasura is a great tool to build any CRUD GraphQL API. Hasura does not have any authentication mechanisms; e.g., you need an auth server to handle sign-up and sign-in.