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by RussianCow 1949 days ago
> It does. But it also means that the problem exists.

The exact same problem exists on the client side with REST. I get what you're saying, but it's a lot easier to fix N+1 issues at the GraphQL resolver level, because once you've fixed it, you don't have to touch it again. With REST, you end up either creating ad hoc endpoints or changes to solve each individual problem in isolation, or you end up building a lot more flexibility into your REST API to solve it in a general way, in which case you've badly reinvented GraphQL without benefiting from the existing ecosystem.
2 comments
andrewingram 1949 days ago
Right. Regardless of how you go about doing things, if a UI is going to compose more than one kind of resource (which in reality is pretty much every UI), there's going to be some kind of n+1 problem hidden in there somewhere -- unless you go down the route of building a bespoke endpoint per screen or operation, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's not the work I want to spend my time doing when building products.

What GraphQL essentially gives you is a mechanism for providing a specification and getting back an endpoint, either fully dynamically at runtime, or at build-time if using persisted queries.

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dmitriid 1949 days ago
> but it's a lot easier to fix N+1 issues at the GraphQL resolver level,

It definitely isn't. And, once again, dataloaders are just the first step.

> With REST, you end up either creating ad hoc endpoints or changes to solve each individual problem in isolation, or you end up building a lot more flexibility into your REST API to solve it in a general way

Even with a "general way" your REST endpoint knows what actual request or a type of request it's solving. So, instead of doing several requests to the database where each request is essentially "SELECT *", you'll be doing queries optimised for the specific request type.

And there are many-many other things. Like caching. For which Apollo has to unpack and look into every single request and response, for example (and libraries in other languages don't solve at all).

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