I'm leaning towards letting the elements of my app that need to be in Rails be in Rails, but moving the GraphQL layer to Hasura, bypassing the ActiveRecord complexity. Has anyone else taken this approach?
Yes. Well, we’ve built a prototype recently that just uses Hasura for the backend (don’t need anything other than data access at this stage).
It’s a really great engine and I’m glad we took a punt on it. Aside from the expected behaviour, you get some nice bonus stuff like nested updates for free.
We mostly tried it out because we normally use python and we wanted subscriptions. The graphql story in python (especially async) isn’t amazing. When we need more business logic, we’ll build it in python and then you can get Hasura to do delivery to python (to ensure each event is run exactly once).
I’d recommend kicking the tyres to see if it works for you. The team are awesome too, and moving quickly. I have no affiliation but I think it’s going to do really well.
Performance is really good (not that we’re using it at scale - but apparently even there it shines).
They use a really clever technique for loading where not only do they. pull all the child data for multiple parent records as a single hit, they actually run a single query for multiple connected clients.
So if you have 10,000 connected clients subscribed to the same graphql queries, they build a temp table with 10k rows (one per client) and add all the environment variables. Then they execute the queries once to get all the data for everyone at once (joining to the temp table and also joining to all the tables for access rules you set up in Hasura). Then they split it up and send back the relevant chunks to each client. It’s much more performant than Postgres RSL because the rules can be executed in the joins in a way that works for every client at the same time.
There are a lot of per-query optimizations that can be done, and I think I have read somewhere that Hasura does them very aggressively, ensuring performance even on complicated queries.
In any case, you won't have to worry about N+1 Query problems with Hasura.
I'm currently working on relegating the Rails app to the API, 95% of queries will be handled by elasticsearch, if it makes sense to make a GraphQL client, I will. Most of our searches are pre-defined, we're using elasticsearch mainly for boosting and relevance score, autocomplete, and having a unified search across a bunch of different installations such as a rails app, wordpress and a few others.
It’s a really great engine and I’m glad we took a punt on it. Aside from the expected behaviour, you get some nice bonus stuff like nested updates for free.
We mostly tried it out because we normally use python and we wanted subscriptions. The graphql story in python (especially async) isn’t amazing. When we need more business logic, we’ll build it in python and then you can get Hasura to do delivery to python (to ensure each event is run exactly once).
I’d recommend kicking the tyres to see if it works for you. The team are awesome too, and moving quickly. I have no affiliation but I think it’s going to do really well.