[3dfan]

I think the language the developer writes their queries in is most important. It is very easy and logical to express what you want in SQL. Say we want to show a list of cities with more than a million people. Easy:

    SELECT name FROM cities WHERE population>1000000

GraphQL queries on the other hand always look like gibberish to me.

[hobofan]

Good thing that GraphQL traditionally (despite it's name) isn't really the query language of graph databases.

Same query in Cypher (the language used by e.g. Neo4J, RedisGraph):

    MATCH (n:Country) WHERE n.population > 1000000 RETURN n.name

[aptxkid]

How a graph DB index the data to support this query?

[hobofan]

Usually there are indices on the properties of specific labels (e.g. for the .population of :Country), in graph databases with labeled nodes (most of them), so in general pretty much the same as in a relational database.

[3dfan]

Is that the shortest way to write it in Cypher?

SQL needs 48 chars:

    SELECT name FROM cities WHERE population>1000000

Cypher needs 57 chars:

    MATCH (n:cities) WHERE n.population>1000000 RETURN n.name

I would be very hesitant to use a language that needs 19% more code to express the same thing.

[joelschw]

This example doesn't demonstrate any of the power of Cypher, the whole point is matching a pattern than corresponds to a traversal, which as it happens is much much more elegant than recursive SQL

[angelzen]

Would be nice though to have an example that does demonstrate the power of Cypher.

[clpm4j]

SELECT p.ProductName FROM Product AS p JOIN ProductCategory pc ON (p.CategoryID = pc.CategoryID AND pc.CategoryName = "Dairy Products")

JOIN ProductCategory pc1 ON (p.CategoryID = pc1.CategoryID) JOIN ProductCategory pc2 ON (pc1.ParentID = pc2.CategoryID AND pc2.CategoryName = "Dairy Products")

JOIN ProductCategory pc3 ON (p.CategoryID = pc3.CategoryID) JOIN ProductCategory pc4 ON (pc3.ParentID = pc4.CategoryID) JOIN ProductCategory pc5 ON (pc4.ParentID = pc5.CategoryID AND pc5.CategoryName = "Dairy Products");

-----------------------------------------------

MATCH (p:Product)-[:CATEGORY]->(l:ProductCategory)-[:PARENT*0..]->(:ProductCategory {name:"Dairy Products"}) RETURN p.name

[somewhereoutth]

So basically allow 'named joins' in SQL and we are done.

[dreyfan]

GraphQL has absolutely nothing to do with graph databases nor SQL databases. It’s a poorly named schema for making RPC calls and designating the response structure.

[dreamcompiler]

Exactly. GraphQL is merely REST 2.0. That's all it is. Whether it's even an improvement over REST 1.0 is debatable.