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Evaluating

Hopefully you’ve been convinced that PostGraphile serves an awesome GraphQL API, but now let’s take a more critical look at whether or not you should adopt PostGraphile for your project.

PostGraphile’s audience is for people who want to prioritize their product. PostGraphile allows you to define your content model in the database as you normally would, however instead of building the bindings to the database (your API) PostGraphile takes care of it.

This takes a huge maintenance burden off your shoulders. Now you don’t have to worry about optimizing the API and the database, instead you can focus on just optimizing your database. Scaling a database is well-understood - and you can combine techniques - scaling vertically with larger database servers (more RAM, faster storage), or horizontally with read replicas.

No Lock-In​

PostGraphile does not lock you into using PostGraphile forever - in fact most of the work you do implementing a PostGraphile API is in your database, which you can take with you if you chose to move to a different system, so no work is lost. If you feel comfortable with the cost of building your API, PostGraphile is simple to switch with a custom solution - you can even export the GraphQL SDL PostGraphile builds for you so you just need to implement your own resolvers. And thanks to graphile-export, if your plugins support it, you can export your GraphQL schema as executable code including the Grafast plan resolvers.

PostGraphile does not ask you to do anything too divergent with your PostgreSQL schema, allowing you to take your schema (and all your data) to whatever solution you build next, and being confident that it was well designed - hand rolled by you! GraphQL itself provides a simple and clear deprecation path if you want to start using different fields. And of course with Graphile Build plugins you can extend (or remove) functionality as you wish.

Further, you can migrate away from PostGraphile bit by bit by placing a GraphQL proxy in front of it and redirecting certain resolvers to your new solution. This enables you to move away from PostGraphile with zero downtime.

Ideally PostGraphile will scale with your company (get in touch if you're facing scaling issues - we can almost certainly help!), however there is a simple exit path even years into the business. We welcome your contributions to help PostGraphile scale and meet your needs, and are very open to sponsored improvements to the software.

Schema Driven APIs​

If you fundamentally disagree with "one-to-one mapping of a SQL schema to an API" (GraphQL or otherwise) this section is for you.

First of all, PostGraphile's out of the box behavior is not necessarily meant to be the be-all and end-all of your API. PostGraphile was created to allow you to focus on your product and not the API. If you need to integrate external systems, there are easy to use ways to extend your schema (e.g. makeExtendSchemaPlugin). If you want to exclude things from your schema, we have a powerful behavior system you can use to accomplish that using global preferences and local overrides, or you can simply remove things from the schema. If you want a custom manually written API there is a simple transition path (read no lock in).

If you still can’t get over the auto-generated nature of PostGraphile consider the following arguments why putting your business logic in PostgreSQL is a good idea:

  1. PostgreSQL already has a powerful user management system with fine grained row level security. A custom API would mean you have to build your own user management and security, and having to guarantee that every possible route to your database data is vetted by the same permissions logic (which PostgreSQL RLS does for you).
  2. PostgreSQL allows you to hide implementation details with views of your data. Simple views can even be auto-updatable. This provides you with the same freedom and flexibility as you might want from a custom API except more performant.
  3. PostgreSQL gives you automatic relations with the REFERENCES constraint and PostGraphile automatically detects them. With a custom API, you’d need to hardcode these relationships, which can become quite a chore!
  4. For what it’s worth, you can write in your favorite scripting language in PostgreSQL, including JavaScript and Ruby.
  5. If you don’t want to write your code inside PostgreSQL, you could also use PostgreSQL’s NOTIFY feature to fire events to a listening Ruby or JavaScript microservice (this could include email transactions and event reporting), implement a job queue (Graphile Worker is one approach to this), or add a Graphile Build plugin to wrap or replace a PostGraphile plan resolver.
  6. Well implemented1 logic in the database can be hundreds or even thousands of times faster than implementing the same logic in the application layer via an ORM or similar abstraction; this performance improvement can eliminate the need for caching and the dreaded cache invalidation problem, at least for a while. In the database, all the data is right there - there's no need for expensive roundtrips over the network, and the serialization/deserialization and data transfer costs are eliminated since no data is transferred to remote clients.

Still worried about a certain aspect of a schema driven API? Open an issue, we're confident we can convince you otherwise 😉

This article was originally written by Caleb Meredith.

  1. "Well implemented" because it's easy to write code that performs really badly in the database (just as it is in the application layer) if you use the wrong approach. The procedural patterns you may have learned in your programming language of choice are likely not the patterns that you should employ in the database - databases (and SQL) use a more declarative approach to programming, when you use procedural patterns you can introduce huge performance issues. For example: looping in the database is expensive, instead you should use single statements to process all your data at once in a way that can be highly optimized. Function calls are also expensive in PostgreSQL, instead of calling a function as part of every row (especially when there could be hundreds of millions of rows!) you should try and call a function once for the entire set. We have some documentation on this in Understanding function performance and Writing performant RLS policies.↩