February 2023 Summaries

In a comparison of Hasura and DIY Node.js GraphQL APIs on PostgreSQL, Hasura consistently outperforms the DIY approach in terms of query response times and memory usage. The benchmark tests show that Hasura performs better while drastically reducing the effort and resources required to build an API. Hasura enables developers to instantly create a production-grade GraphQL and REST API with authorization and other essential features, such as event triggers, real-time capabilities, and much more for their data without writing code. It automatically generates an API with a GraphQL schema, queries, mutations, subscriptions, and saves significant time and effort since developers don't need to write logic for basic CRUD operations manually.

In this tutorial, we learn how to use Hasura to rapidly build APIs on top of the Snowflake data to power embedded analytics in mobile/web apps. Using Hasura, we can quickly create secure and performant GraphQL/REST APIs on Snowflake, and then query the API from a React frontend. This post demonstrates how to create a performant data API on Snowflake in minutes with Hasura. The tutorial covers five steps: deploying Hasura, connecting your Snowflake Data Source, tracking tables from Snowflake, querying your Snowflake API, and querying your Snowflake API with React.

This blog post discusses using OpenTelemetry Traces to observe Hasura-powered applications. It explains that traces are used to find problems in an application and provide end-to-end visibility into a system's operations by tracing requests through all the different services. A span is an operation that represents a part of the workflow. The post also covers how Hasura has instrumented code for API queries, mutations, and subscriptions with traces for its Cloud and Enterprise products in the OpenTelemetry format. It provides instructions on how to get started by configuring Hasura to send traces to an OTLP endpoint and using observability tools like DataDog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Sumo Logic to analyze and monitor traces.

HasuraCon 2023 is a free three-day virtual event for developers worldwide, taking place on June 20-22. The Call for Proposals is open until March 10 and seeks submissions from the Hasura dev community showcasing interesting projects or unique ways of using specific features. Potential talk topics include Hasura in Production, Feature Deep Dives, Best Practices, Architecture Show-And-Tell, and Hacked on Hasura.

Hasura Cloud has introduced elastic connection pooling in v2.15 to manage high availability and scalability on its platform. This feature allows developers to create instant APIs on databases that can handle large numbers of client requests, such as those from e-commerce customers building SaaS cloud platforms or financial institutions serving extensive partner and developer communities. Elastic connection pooling helps in handling the challenges posed by limited database connections and overcoming issues related to service disruption, data inconsistency, and costly troubleshooting. The feature is currently supported for PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server data sources, with plans to expand support to other databases and self-hosted Hasura instances in the future.

In this post, Brenden Bishop shares how Hasura saved their Beta launch when they lost their entire database just 10 days before the target date. Hasura is an open-source GraphQL engine that enables developers to create scalable APIs quickly and easily using existing databases. The author explains how Hasura's "database as code" implementation allowed them to recover from the loss by applying metadata, migrations, and seeds using Hasura's command-line tools. They also share a step-by-step guide on setting up Hasura with this implementation. Overall, Hasura has proven to be an invaluable tool for their team, saving time and headaches while building scalable GraphQL APIs.

One Click Deploy to Hasura Cloud is a new feature that allows users to quickly create, share and explore projects on the platform. Existing developers can now share their backends for others to try out, while new users can easily explore GraphQL backends with various use cases. The feature works by automatically creating a new project in the Hasura Cloud dashboard when a "Deploy to Hasura Cloud" button is clicked, applying migrations, metadata and seeds from the GitHub repo of the sample app connected to the button. Users can also dynamically enter environment variables required to run the Hasura project. The Hasura Hub page has been launched for users to browse a list of sample apps that can be deployed quickly using this feature.

Hasura is updating its pricing and plans to better align with the value customers receive from the platform. This change will provide more flexibility and cost predictability for users as they scale their usage. The new Professional plan, starting at $1.50/hour, replaces the current $99/month Standard plan on Hasura Cloud. Usage limits and features in plans have been updated to better align with each plan's objectives. Existing Free and Standard plan users can continue running their projects at legacy pricing and entitlements until they decide to upgrade. The new pricing model will be rolled out gradually, with full details available on the Hasura pricing page.

This article discusses an alternative way to build GraphQL Data APIs without the difficulties of manually-built APIs. It presents a custom-built GraphQL API that represents a digital media store connected to the Chinook database, which includes tables for artists, albums, and tracks. The main focus is on resolvers, which are functions that specify how to process a specific GraphQL operation and turn it into data. The article highlights the challenges of writing GraphQL resolvers manually, such as boilerplate code, complexity, performance issues, and maintenance requirements. It also mentions the need for ensuring API security and scalability. To address these challenges, Hasura is introduced as a solution that automatically generates SQL queries from GraphQL operations without requiring manual implementation of resolvers. Hasura is a GraphQL Engine that makes data instantly accessible over a real-time GraphQL API by connecting to your data source and generating the necessary schema, queries, mutations, subscriptions, CRUD operations, and authorization rules. It can also merge remote GraphQL schemas and provide a unified GraphQL API through Remote Schemas. Additional ways of adding custom business logic include Actions and Event Triggers. Actions allow for extending Hasura's schema with custom business logic using custom queries and mutations, while Event Triggers reliably capture events on specified tables and invoke HTTP webhooks to carry out any custom logic.