October 2020 Summaries

Hasura is an innovative platform designed to streamline application development by providing a service that converts the cumbersome process of building data APIs into a more efficient solution. It addresses the challenge of accessing and integrating data from multiple sources, particularly in enterprise environments, by enabling developers to configure a web server quickly and expose a production-ready API. Inspired by database systems, Hasura offers a metadata engine that captures domain-specific requirements and automates the generation of secure, flexible web APIs. It excels in providing instant GraphQL APIs, built-in authorization, application-level caching, and supports real-time APIs and stateless business logic through its eventing system. Without requiring a specific language or framework, Hasura integrates seamlessly with existing data sources and authentication systems, offering a "No Ops" vision by reducing operational burdens and facilitating rapid development across different environments.

GraphQL Contributor Days is an online event in partnership with This Dot Media. The event aims to provide updates on the community and offer direct access to core contributors and authors of various libraries and frameworks through live chat and an online broadcast. Topics covered include new developments in GraphQL, authorization and security patterns, using GraphQL with microservices, and the API lifecycle. Notable guests include founders and engineers from This Dot Media, Hasura, Coursera, Stitch Fix, Twitter, Moon Highway, Twingate, APIs.guru, GitLab, and The Guild. Sign up to receive the livestream link and suggest topics for discussion.

This blogpost introduces Postgres and its popular features that can be used to enhance your Hasura GraphQL API. Postgres is a general-purpose object-relational database management system that uses and extends the SQL language, offering advanced data types and performance optimization features. Some key features of Postgres include constraints, views, functions, triggers, and indexes. Constraints ensure data integrity by defining rules for columns in a table, while views simplify complex queries by representing the result of a query to one or more underlying tables. Functions allow customization of database schema with procedural computations and can take arguments, while triggers invoke previously defined Postgres functions before or after specific database events. Indexes increase performance on frequently queried columns by maintaining additional metadata. These features can be used in Hasura to optimize the GraphQL API, improve query performance, and enhance data validation.