Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 199 posts

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#161

Post by swyx »

pramodliv1 wrote: post #97
elitan wrote: post #22

This is fantastic to see. First time I tried out Hasura back in late 2018 I was AMAZED. After going through multiple different stacks such as MeteorJS, Firebase, building my own REST/GraphQL API etc. Nothing really felt right. That was until I found out about Hasura. I actually had to assemble a quick meetup at the co-working space I was on (true story) to show everybody this software. Hasura Tweet: https://twitter.c…

I spent 3 days setting up Hasura a few weeks ago and I wish I'd known about Nhost. Do you know why Hasura don't provide a managed service themselves? Also, I wonder if Hasura will eventually move to a MongoDB-like license.

i have heard (from multiple founders in the space) that the hosted db business is a difficult one to be in. see for reference graphcool's switch to prisma.

i suspect that mainly applies to venture backed businesses - it could be a great lifestyle biz

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#162

Post by haolez »

marton78 wrote: post #146
haolez wrote: post #2

I tend to prefer PostgREST's[1] syntax over GraphQL for when I need flexible client-side queries. It's way more intuitive for me. [1] http://postgrest.org/

How do you make subscriptions work with PostgRest?

Probably by returning an endpoint and a token to a service that will handle the perpetual session.

The scope is smaller than GraphQL, but some of the interesting benefits - like smarter and more optimized requests - are available with PostgREST.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#163

Post by betocmn »

tango12 wrote: post #25
betocmn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! It could be useful for simple apps if they add a way to create basic validation rules with regex.

The Hasura console actually makes it quite easy to manage check constraints and validation rules! :) Here's an example for a regex for validating email from one of our community calls: https://youtu.be/-9jX21PKyk0?list=PLTRTpHrUcSB8Dp3hk5SiVNHNP...

Great to know, elegant approach.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#164

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

I looked at Hasura a while back, and to be honest I thought it was the antithesis of all the things I loved about GraphQL so I moved on. Perhaps someone can convince me differently?

The thing I love most about GraphQL is that serves as the perfect contract layer between the front end and the backend. A very productive development method I've used is to have the front end and back end teams agree on the GraphQL types (often times having the front end folks actually write the types), quickly mock things out, then have the front end folks go implement the front end and the back end folks provide the real resolver implementations.

The things I love about this is that it really simplifies and hides the backend details from the front ends. With things like Hasura, you are directly exposing your DB schemas to the front end, essentially tightly coupling them together. That has always been a recipe for disaster whenever a project gets sufficient scale or complexity in my opinion.

Again, it was a long time ago when I dug into Hasura, but this whole concept of "Directly expose my DB schema as GraphQL" is the exact opposite of what I love about GraphQL in the first place.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#165

Post by pkghost »

simplify wrote: post #126
latch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what I'm doing is working on a CRUD backend. The thing has a bunch of complex business and authorization rules. Not to mention a bunch of per-client customization. There's also some neat handling around versioning and copy-on-write type behavior to provide a mix of immutability and space saving. To me, this is CRUD because: most resources literally have 4 endpoints (create, index, update and delete). We write…

GraphQL by itself won't save you time, and might even increase it (it's a huge buy-in). You'd still have to implement the logic for those 4 endpoints, except now in a more complicated system. In contrast, tools like Hasura and Postgraphile can potentially save you time because they generate the GraphQL part for you. Then you only need to handle the authN/authZ parts – in theory, at least.

Auth is about 15 lines in an SQL function exposed via the api w/postgraphile, plus whatever lines necessary to define your RLS policies and grants.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#167

Post by btilly »

markhalonen wrote: post #65
awb wrote: post #53

Some major players in the "GraphQL in a box" space: https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/ https://hasura.io/ https://www.prisma.io/ There are plenty of "REST API in a box" solutions as well: https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest https://github.com/prest/prest https://resthapi.com/

I ultimately chose Postgraphile over Hasura. Mostly because the Postgraphile codebase seemed way hackable, written in TS/JS with a plugin architecture. I've tried some Haskell and that's just a whole nother world I don't have time to learn. So far it's working great for me.

I made the same evaluation 2 months ago and came to the same decision.

But in my case it was because my existing database is a fairly complicated beast with a lot of updating through stored procedures on views. Hasura wanted to have control of what is happening in the database and there was zero chance that it would agree with the existing triggers about what should happen or how it worked. (Example of an issue, Hasura wants to own the view and view structure so that it can make real time subscriptions work.)

By contrast Postgraphile was happy to be pointed at a schema of views for just what it should see, read a https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/smart-tags-file/ and believe what it was told there about the underlying database structure, and then expose an API that showed what I wanted it to show without breaking what was under the hood.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#168

Post by james_s_tayler »

samblr wrote: post #134
elitan wrote: post #22

This is fantastic to see. First time I tried out Hasura back in late 2018 I was AMAZED. After going through multiple different stacks such as MeteorJS, Firebase, building my own REST/GraphQL API etc. Nothing really felt right. That was until I found out about Hasura. I actually had to assemble a quick meetup at the co-working space I was on (true story) to show everybody this software. Hasura Tweet: https://twitter.c…

Just tried hasura, it is amazing to get all crud graphql apis out of box. How do we add business logic ? Folks @hasura, where do we learn about haskell ? any helpful pointers much appreciated.

I'm considering trying Hasura (or preferably something that can run on SQL Server as that's what we use in production. For me it feels as if trying to do the entire app through Hasura is the wrong approach. But, if we apply CQRS and treat reads different than writes then if we just use it for all of the reads in the system it could eliminate a tonne of code for us. The transactional code can still all go through entity framework and rest APIs.

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#169

Post by chris_st »

elitan wrote: post #113
city41 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been shopping around all the BAAS offerings and nhost is really intriguing. Thanks for sharing.

Happy to hear. Let me know if you got some advice for us to improve the product.

Hi elitan -- since you asked, let me throw out my two cents.

I'm comparing you to Heroku, sorry if that's not your ideal comparison.

I think you need some different price points; the $4/month is great to get started, but the $40/month with 15M just really pales in comparison with Heroku's $50/month for 64G... particularly when I compare it with your $139/month for 5G of database.

Thanks for a great looking product, though!

Re: Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL

#170

Post by rojobuffalo »

awb wrote: post #132
rojobuffalo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on GraphQL services since 2015. I worked on the design of the precursor to postgraphile; it was called postgraphql. Hadn't heard of Hasura before today, but it looks interesting. The primary complaints I hear from others about GraphQL are observability and the learning curve for devs who are new to it. I think these projects add a lot of value with tools like the GraphQL playground (similar to Graph…

Curious if you were active on the precursor to postgraphile why you feel Prisma is a better option. It's been my experience as well, but would love to hear what the deciding factors were for you.

Postgraphile is more open-ended and advanced, which could be better for some cases. I really like it and enjoy writing the PostgreSQL directly. Prisma compresses the domain a little more than Postgraphile, which means its a little simpler.

The Prisma datamodel very closely mirrors the GraphQL schema. It has just a bare minimum variance to allow different data types (and maybe something else I'm forgetting). I think the generated GraphQL for the database client ends up being simpler and easier to debug; but that's just my feeling about it.

The Prisma database admin tool at `host:port/_admin` is nice; and compliments the GraphQL Playground really well. Prisma develops GraphQL Playground as an open-source project, inspired by GraphiQL which comes out-of-the-box with graphql-server.

Post reply on HN