What Is GraphQL?

GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, originally developed by Facebook in 2012 and publicly released in 2015. GraphQL allows clients to understand the data that your APIs expose and ask for only the portions they want. With GraphQL, you can create applications and services to aggregate data from multiple services or data stores.

Why GraphQL For Cassandra?

GraphQL improves upon some of the limitations of the popular REST API style by providing a typesafe, graph-based schema, where nodes represent objects and edges represent relationships. This allows clients to query and manipulate multiple data items with a single query. Queries target a single URL endpoint to perform graph traversals, which access dictionaries of values in each node. This allows clients to get tailored data in a single query, instead of multiple round trips using heavy payloads of entire records.

When the Stargate GraphQL API is added to an existing Cassandra deployment, it automatically creates HTTP endpoints that expose GraphQL queries and mutations for the objects that it finds in the database. You can also create new database tables directly via the API. The built-in GraphQL Playground servlet makes it easy to prototype your mutations and queries and experiment with new approaches.

How To Get The Stargate GraphQL API

Stargate is an open-source data gateway, and is now available in DataStax Astra. If you have an Astra database, the Stargate GraphQL API is already enabled. If you have access to your own self-hosted Cassandra cluster, see the Stargate documentation for instructions on how to install and use the GraphQL API. Stargate is also distributed with K8ssandra.io for Kubernetes users and included in DataStax Enterprise.