June 2023 Summaries

The Hasura GraphQL engine automates API creation from existing database objects like tables, views, functions, and stored procedures, leading to significant time savings for developers. However, there are instances when more custom or advanced functionality is required beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities. Hasura's Native Queries feature provides a powerful tool for enhancing your GraphQL API with the flexibility and control of raw SQL queries. By leveraging Native Queries, you can create custom and advanced behavior in your Hasura-generated GraphQL schema without the need for additional database objects or DDL privileges. This enables you to unlock the full potential of SQL while building robust and efficient applications with Hasura.

Hasura has introduced several improvements to its caching capabilities, including enabling caching on the Hasura Cloud Free tier with a 100 MB storage limit and support for Redis clusters in the Enterprise Edition for enhanced scalability and high availability. Additionally, caching is now available for remote schemas and actions, improving performance and reducing latency when fetching data from external sources. Furthermore, observability has been improved with more caching-related Prometheus metrics to monitor cache hit/miss rates and other crucial performance indicators. These updates aim to provide better performance and observability while working with Hasura's caching system.

The text describes an interesting incident where feedback on a company's documentation was received from another company, which had copied the original documentation verbatim. This led to the introduction of a logic that prevents such inputs if not from their domain. The company has an open-source core and encourages contributions to improve its documentation. It also provides a one-liner command for users to get started with their own Hasura docs site, which will soon be upgraded to v3.

In healthcare information systems, interoperability, security, and privacy are crucial parameters. Legacy systems across different facilities maintain records in various data stores and formats. Building a modern-day healthcare solution requires complex wiring of these legacy systems, diverse data formats and standards, and automation through a secure, high-performance data API layer that can be easily consumed by developers from multiple organizations. Hasura is a Data API Platform designed to simplify building and operating production data APIs, reducing cost, complexity, and time to market. It connects to databases (legacy or modern, existing or new) and instantly generates GraphQL APIs. In this post, we explore how low-code API approaches like Hasura accelerate the modernization journey of applications in healthcare. Healthcare data management involves a variety of standards designed to ensure data interoperability, privacy, and security. Some common standards include HL7 v2, FHIR, OMOP/OHDSI, and SNOMED-CT. Hasura can automate CRUD APIs for these models instantly and provide an eventing system for sending HL7 v2 messages between facilities managing patient records. Modernization initiatives in healthcare often involve significant time, money, and people investment. Building or rebuilding the API layer to wire modern and legacy components together is usually the slowest and most arduous part of the process. Hasura supports modern API standards like REST/GraphQL with JSON and can connect to legacy databases, helping incrementally migrate to modern databases tailored for specific workloads. API Automation with Hasura reduces the time developers spend writing APIs by automatically generating a GraphQL endpoint with all core GraphQL operations like queries, mutations, and subscriptions. It also provides declarative role-based access control essential for compliance with healthcare data regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Hasura Cloud is designed to help companies follow the three tenets of information security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It is SOC 2 Type II compliant, HIPAA compliant, regularly penetration tested, ISO certified, and GDPR compliant. Hasura's advanced security features include a native Authorization system, audit logs, API allow lists and limits, and addressing OWASP Top 10 concerns. Unified Health Records with Data Federation in Hasura provides an integrated view of patient health records, leading to speedier, more accurate diagnoses without any code changes or proprietary modifications. It supports multi-protocol federation across databases, REST APIs, and GraphQL APIs, as well as a schema registry for evolving schemas transparently, controlled, and collaboratively. In summary, Hasura has helped many Fortune 500 companies modernize their healthcare systems with its high-performance data access API engine, real-time capabilities, and compliance with industry standards for data regulations.

The text discusses how to integrate Hasura with vector databases (VectorDBs) to build production-ready applications quickly. It provides a use case of an HR management app that lets candidates apply for jobs and allows HR managers to assign candidates to hiring managers while tracking progress from a single dashboard. The text then explains how large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged with the help of VectorDBs, which store mathematical representations of input text. It also covers setting up Hasura with Weaviate, a popular VectorDB, and creating tables in Postgres database. Finally, it demonstrates querying across data stores using GraphQL queries and adding access control to ensure only authorized users can view specific applications.

The Hasura Schema Registry is a version control system for GraphQL schemas that helps developers detect breaking changes in APIs before they are released into production. It classifies changes as 'Breaking', 'Dangerous', and 'Safe' to provide an overview of the impact of each change. This tool is particularly useful for managing role-based schema changes and can be integrated with staging or pre-production environments to alert developers about worrisome schema changes. By using the Hasura Schema Registry, teams can ensure that their APIs remain coherent and reliable, reducing the risk of unexpected issues in production.

Hasura is now available on Microsoft Azure Cloud starting June 2023. This expansion means Hasura can be accessed on all leading cloud providers, including AWS and GCP. Users can leverage Azure Cloud's ecosystem services, high performance with security and compliance, and effortless scalability to reach users across multiple regions. Existing Hasura users can create a new project on Azure by selecting it as the cloud option in their dashboard. New region requests can be submitted through the Hasura Dashboard.

Hasura has introduced its MongoDB Data Connector (Beta) for developers working with NoSQL databases. This new feature aims to streamline work and boost developer efficiency by allowing users to track collections as easily as tables and views from Postgres, auto-generate types using the MongoDB validation schema, and deliver first-class performance through field projection and permission predicate pushdowns. The current features include schema generation, document filtering, field-level permissions, and federated relationships. Upcoming enhancements will focus on querying and permissions for embedded documents, improved cross-collection and datasource relationships, customizable GraphQL schemas, and the ability to create logical models.

At the HasuraCon 2023 event, several major announcements were made regarding product advancements in APIs and data access management. These include the introduction of Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN), which enables developers to run low-latency/high-performance data APIs at global scale without additional effort or fees; updates to Hasura Schema Registry, making managing, governing, and collaborating on a federated API even simpler; and the open sourcing of model-driven API design and data connectivity. Other announcements include new Hasura GraphQL type for database interactivity, support for MongoDB, and availability of Hasura Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

In this blog post, we explore how Hasura, a powerful GraphQL engine, revolutionizes the API ecosystem by enabling data aggregation, supporting microservices and federated GraphQL, facilitating serverless architecture, enabling multi-cloud strategies, and empowering real-time updates and event-driven APIs. Hasura's ability to automatically generate APIs based on existing databases makes it an exceptional data aggregator, simplifying data access and accelerating development. By integrating Hasura with your microservices infrastructure, you can seamlessly aggregate and compose data from different services, simplifying the development process and providing a unified API interface for clients. Hasura's support for federated GraphQL enables organizations to build distributed systems that span across multiple data sources, promoting data virtualization and allowing clients to interact with a unified GraphQL schema while abstracting the complexities of the underlying data sources. By utilizing Hasura in serverless architecture, organizations can achieve agility, scalability, and reduced development effort. In addition, Hasura enables seamless integration with multiple cloud environments, allowing you to deploy and manage your APIs across different cloud providers. This approach allows organizations to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy and leverage the benefits of different cloud platforms without exposing the complexities to clients. Lastly, real-time updates and event-driven APIs are essential for applications that require instant data synchronization and real-time communication, which Hasura provides out-of-the-box support for.

The Hasura team has implemented aggregation queries for computed fields in GraphQL Engine. This feature allows users to aggregate computed fields just like any other fields, making it easier to compute values based on the current state of application data without requiring table schema changes or additional database triggers. Parsing and generating SQL for these queries involve extending the query parser, intermediate representation, and aggregation query generator to recognize and handle computed fields appropriately. This feature is available in Hasura v2.27 for Postgres.

The United States Congress recently undertook a modernization project for their 30-year-old technology stack, completing it in a shockingly fast manner compared to most enterprises. This was achieved by automating the API building process, which significantly increased developer productivity and allowed them to focus on business logic. Key benefits of this approach included simplified authentication and authorization, easy integration with existing systems, undisrupted operations during the transition period, and scalability for future growth. The success of this project has prompted plans to implement similar architectures in other applications managed by the Legislative Applications department.

Hasura has launched General Availability (GA) support for Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing platform. By integrating GraphQL with Snowflake, developers can leverage the strengths of both technologies to create efficient, flexible, and responsive APIs for data-driven applications. In this tutorial, we will create a sample app using Weather data available on the Snowflake marketplace that utilizes user-defined functions (UDFs) and provides instant GraphQL API in just a few steps. The architecture involves setting up Hasura as an API layer to expose Snowflake data to clients. By tracking tables from Snowflake, developers can instantly get a GraphQL API on top of the data warehouse that they can use to start querying the data. Caching can be used to decrease response times and improve latencies when frequently fetching the same data. Hasura also supports UDFs in Snowflake, allowing users to create custom functions and track them in Hasura's console for querying purposes. Overall, the combination of Hasura Cloud and Snowflake provides an effective way to build scalable, secure, and performant GraphQL APIs on top of a powerful data warehouse.

Hasura has announced its integration with Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing platform. This collaboration aims to accelerate the development cycle for data-intensive applications by reducing the effort required to create a data API that acts as a self-service data access layer for application developers and other data consumers. The Hasura Data Connector for Snowflake enables developers to rapidly build multi-tenant mobile/web applications directly on Snowflake Data Cloud, without spending countless hours writing (and securing, tuning, hardening, etc) the APIs required to serve the data to the frontend. This integration makes it incredibly simple to build applications on top of Snowflake, taking advantage of its elasticity, performance, and scalability.

In today's digital landscape, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play a crucial role in enabling seamless integration, data exchange, and collaboration across various systems and applications. As organizations strive to build robust API strategies, they often turn to API gateway tools to effectively manage and secure their APIs. This blog post explores the powerful combination of Hasura, a cutting-edge GraphQL engine, with API gateway tools. While Hasura itself offers comprehensive API management capabilities, we will focus on how existing API gateway tools can complement and enhance Hasura, empowering developers and organizations to unlock the full potential of their API strategies.

Hasura and Apollo are both popular tools in the GraphQL ecosystem. While they co-exist in this space, the amount of code, time, effort, and skills it takes to go from data to production-grade GraphQL API is very different in Hasura and Apollo. In most enterprise use cases, Hasura is better than Apollo for building and running production GraphQL APIs at scale. Hasura is a data API automation platform that removes the tedious parts of building and operating production-ready APIs on data. It eliminates or automates 50-80% effort that goes into building, securing, deploying, and scaling production APIs for the data sources it supports. In contrast, Apollo is a GraphQL tooling company that provides open-source and proprietary tools to enable developers to build apps with GraphQL. Hasura's main value over DIY GraphQL tools like Apollo is time to value. It auto-generates a full-featured and customizable GraphQL API endpoint from your database in minutes, whereas Apollo requires manual writing of resolvers and boilerplate code for the same purpose. Hasura also provides built-in features for performance optimization, security, governance, developer experience, real-time APIs, and GraphQL federation, which are not available or require additional setup with Apollo. In conclusion, while both tools have their merits, Hasura offers significant advantages in terms of time to value, automation, and built-in features that make it a better choice for building and running production GraphQL APIs at scale in most enterprise use cases.

Hasura introduces Webhook Auth Caching, a new enhancement that optimizes the performance of webhook-based authentication mode. This feature saves network round-trip time and reduces load on the authentication infrastructure, enabling it to scale effortlessly as user base grows. Webhook Auth Caching not only enhances security but also improves application performance by reducing the number of webhook calls required for each GraphQL query execution. By caching the webhook auth response in Hasura, subsequent requests with the same token do not require additional webhook requests for a given period of time. This results in increased GraphQL query performance and reduced load on the auth service.

HasuraCon 2023 is a virtual event taking place on June 20-22 for developers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts. The conference will feature experts discussing the latest trends, insights, and innovations in GraphQL, data architecture, and app development. Attendees can expect access to unparalleled learning opportunities through diverse sessions, workshops, and keynotes; networking with tech leaders and peers; staying on top of the latest data trends; hands-on workshops and demos; and discovering new tools and technologies.