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Comment by greenpizza13 | Hacker News Reader

Things have matured quite a bit. With Apollo Server it's possible to fully understand which fields are being requested before creating and running, for example, and SQL query. Fetching only the requested data for a given query reduces in-memory footprint. Most people get the whole data object and then allow GQL to select the subset of fields the user asked for, but for cases where performance is a problem there is another solution.

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I haven't used Apollo Server lately. But the way you describe it doesn't address the core issue, which is the initialization of the intermediate objects in-memory. So just to give an example, if I wanted to query for the projects of listings of my company, I can write it this way in GQL:

   me { company { listings { projects { id name } } } }

This will initialize: a User, a Company, Listings and Projects of all listings.

I can also write this in SQL using a couple of joins and return an array. The memory consumption is trivial in comparison to the original request.

You can implement your GraphQL server to do either of those, it's not inherent.

You say "problem there is another solution" - what is the other solution? (I'm guessing it involves somehow telling Apollo Server which fields/related objects you will need?)

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