Any plans for continous (read-only) direct database access? Without that, basically every modern BI solution can't be used. I think that besides the obvious lock-in, that's another big hinderance for building real products with Graphcool.
Re:Graphcool – Serverless GraphQL Back End
by sorenbs on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @07:06AM
(#14357296)
Hi hobofan :-)
This is something we are planning to support. We have two approaches, and I'm curious to hear what would work best for you.
1) Add an integration for selectively syncing data to s3. This would work very similar to the Algolia integration and allow you to transform the shape of your data. Tools like Athena and QuickSight can query directly against s3 buckets, and many other services can import data from s3.
2) Add the ability to provision a read replica and offer direct read-only sql access. This option would carry a higher fixed cost, so would not be appropriate for hobby projects.
1) would a very good solution. It's adding the graph cool pieces to an existing data lake. From there anyone can do what she wants (Athena, Quicksight, Import into Redshift/BigQuery). Would love to see that.
BTW saw your talk today at AWS Summit in Berlin. Good job there.
You are raising a very valid point. You should always carefully consider pros and cons before choosing a third party provider.
The primary reason to build your product on Graphcool is speed of execution. Being able to deliver value quickly is important not just to startups, but also increasingly to enterprises getting squeezed in their core market. This is the reason companies adopt Graphcool.
We acknowledge the fear of lock-in. This is why we support open source GraphQL servers and work on standardising your project configuration as much as possible. For example, today we released the new Graphcool CLI that allows you to configure your project using the open IDL specification (https://www.graph.cool/docs/faq/graphql-idl-schema-definitio...) We also make it very easy to export all your data - either as json, using the api or as a raw sql dump.
Does that answer your question?