[bfz]

I've yet to encounter a GraphQL off-the-shelf server (from Python and JS spaces) where hitting a slow query didn't immediately turn into half a day's work

The whole concept is what happens when you let a smart person work on a small problem for far, far too long

[obi1kenobi]

I'd recommend checking out the project link in the comment to which you replied. It is designed _specifically_ to avoid the problem you mention: instead of a fully materialized, fully-nested result, it returns flattened row-oriented results (like a SQL database).

This allows for lazy evaluation i.e. rows are produced only as they are consumed. So if you accidentally write a query that would produce a billion rows but only load 20, the execution of the query only happens for 20 rows + any batching or prefetch optimizations in the adapter used to bind the dataset to the query engine.

[PaulHoule]

It is a fundamental problem of a "graph".

(1) There are usually some nodes of very high degree and traversing those nodes will explode your query, (2) if you are following N links and the average degree is d, you are going to come across dᴺ nodes and that is a lot of nodes as N gets big!

Tim-Berners Lee told me that if you can't send the whole graph you should send a subset of the graph that contains the most important facts.

It's a right answer but also a frustrating one to a programmer who sees correct implementation of algorithms to mean that you get the ticket done and they don't come at you with a ticket about it again. That is, that query I'm writing is part of an algorithm that depends on getting a certain answer and getting an uncertain answer for one query is like some spoiled milk that ruins the whole batch.

[bfz]

> It is a fundamental problem of a "graph".

So why are we using it for so many naturally non-graph problems? 90%+ of developers' exposure to graphs is through tightly abstract interfaces, I could name maybe 3 graph-related algorithms off the top of my head, but could implement none of them without reading.

We could represent the text of this comment in a graph using one node for each unique character, but the result would be stupid, the operations would be slow, the representation needlessly complex, and implementations guaranteeably hard to work with

> Tim-Berners Lee told me that if you can't send the whole graph you should send a subset of the graph that contains the most important facts.

Indeed, I also caught the ReST buzz around the 2000-2003 timeframe, and turns out 20 years later nobody does that either, because in its purest form it's a pain in the ass for comparable reasons to the topic at hand

[PaulHoule]

It's funny to see a blog post on HN almost every day where somebody rediscovers the power of columnar query answering engines which are almost the opposite of graph databases.

I've lost count of how many columnar SQL databases have been donated to the apache project and there are so many systems like Actian and Alteryx where data analysts hook together relational operators with boxes and lines.

I had a prototype of a stream processing engine that passed RDF graphs along the lines between the boxes that enable an "object-relational" model, you could eliminate the need for hard-to-maintain joins but I found that firms that had bought multiple columnar processing database companies believed in performance at all cost and couldn't care less for any system that couldn't be implemented with SIMD instructions.

[eurasiantiger]

How are they opposite? There are plenty of graph databases out there using columnar storage, even ones directly compatible with GraphQL Federation. Best of both worlds, so to speak.

[everforward]

> So why are we using it for so many naturally non-graph problems? 90%+ of developers' exposure to graphs is through tightly abstract interfaces, I could name maybe 3 graph-related algorithms off the top of my head, but could implement none of them without reading.

It's a reasonable abstraction for structuring related bits of data (like would go in a typical relational database), and that abstraction can align with the developer's mental model easier.

E.g. ORMs basically convert SQL data into an in-memory graph. Likewise, graph database APIs are natively more object-y; you follow the edge from child to parent, instead of making a bit of data the same in both tables and then querying matching rows.

They're not perfect, and shouldn't be used everywhere (nor even many places they currently get used), but I can see the appeal of abusing them.

[eurasiantiger]

Because graphs are a good abstraction for relations and with the right tech choices, are much more manageable and malleable than traditional relational databases.

[q-big]

> It's a right answer but also a frustrating one to a programmer who sees correct implementation of algorithms to mean that you get the ticket done and they don't come at you with a ticket about it again.

This rather sounds like a problem about the project manager and the project management methods that he uses.

[PaulHoule]

No. I had a time in my career where I was the guy who finished projects that other people started and couldn't finish.

Some coders really don't have discipline and projects never get done because they don't think things throw and keep sending half-baked patches that get sent back by test or the customer.

The role of management is to get those people working for their competitor and then have the "fixer" move in.