edgedb VS pg_graphql

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?

Hi, I'm the author of Supabase GraphQL (pg_graphql)

One of the restrictions of composite types is that they can not contain an instance of themselves. So unfortunately, this is not currently possible.

I had this issue when trying to implement an AST type for pg_graphql[1] back when it was written in SQL [2]. In the end we used a JSON type which was much less constrained. That might be solvable using pg_jsonschema [3] if you really wanted to have a good time though

[1] https://github.com/supabase/pg_graphql

It’s something that’ll come in future, but nothing available yet: https://github.com/supabase/pg_graphql/issues/17

But... If you're looking for Graphql/Postgres, maybe look at https://github.com/supabase/pg_graphql which popped onto my radar yesterday, but I have no experience with it.

Check out some of the generated queries this extension [1] pumps out and you might have an answer.

[1] https://github.com/supabase/pg_graphql

hey HN, supabase ceo here. I'm really excited about this release.

Our GraphQL implementation is built on top of pg_graphql[0], a PostgreSQL extension we open-sourced a few months ago. The implementation works with a lot of native PG functionality (like Row Level Security). You can also do a some neat things with PG GRANTS, enabling/disabling access to different tables/columns to effectively serve a different GraphQL API depending who is "logged in".

On Supabase, the extension is served via PostgREST[1] using the public PostgreSQL function exposed by pg_graphql. PostgREST exposes PG functions as RPC routes (in our case we also map /rest/v1/rpc/graphql => /graphql/v1)

I'll ping the main dev (@oli_rice) and make sure he is here to answer any technical questions. This is just one of the exciting features we're launching this week. Stay tuned for one of our most-requested features later this week.

[0] pg_graphql: https://github.com/supabase/pg_graphql

[1] PostgREST: https://postgrest.org/