nuwave / nuwave/lighthouse

Select only necessary columns for optimized queries

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discussion performance
Dominant language
PHP
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Description

What problem does this feature proposal attempt to solve?
I am trying out GraphQL, testing various features in order to include it in some of the web apps I am developing with laravel. Being curious, I created a Schema and fired up all sorts of queries, followed by poking around in the SQL server to see what was going on.

What I discovered was this:

Suppose I have a Type defined which corresponds to a Model, and the database table has an ID column and 26 more columns (A, B C, ..., Z).

No matter what the Type definition is, which in my case only includes some of the columns ( say, ID and A, B, C), I can see that the SQL server is asked to fetch all 27 columns from the DB, using a SELECT * FROM [Table] statement, even though given the definition of the type at most 4 of them would be returned via the resolver.

This is an unnecessary data transfer between the DB and PHP, in my opinion.

Which possible solutions should be considered?

I propose that we construct a more refined SQL query, selecting only the columns that are requested in the GraphQL query.

I am not sure I am competent enough to try and implement this on my own, but I will give it a shot. In any case, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the GraphQL selection, Laravel model, and resolver behavior described in the issue, then compare the requested fields with the generated SELECT * query. Done means queries fetch only the columns requested by the GraphQL query without breaking resolver results or related behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
graphql, laravel, php
Domain
api, backend, database
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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