The GraphQL Dataloader Pattern: Visualized
Understanding data loading challenges in GraphQL
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This post is an early preview of Production Ready GraphQL, a book I recently released on building GraphQL servers that goes into great detail on building GraphQL servers at scale: https://book.productionreadygraphql.com Check it out if you enjoy this kind of content!
If you’re getting started with GraphQL, or already running but hitting performance issues with execution of GraphQL queries. Chances are you’ve read something or heard something like “Just use dataloader!”. Let’s try to demystify why we often face data loading issues with GraphQL, and what the dataloader pattern we hear so much about is all about.
The GraphQL schema is what allows clients to know the possibilities exposed by the server, and the server to validate incoming client queries against its interface. However, a GraphQL server usually needs another very import concept to be useful: resolvers. We can see resolvers as simple functions that return the data for a certain exposed GraphQL field. Usually, resolvers will be a function of a field’s parent object (the object that the parent resolver returned), arguments if there are any, and sometimes an additional context argument, which can carry contextual and global information about a query that can be used during execution.
While a very powerful concept that allows a GraphQL engine to dynamically generate client representations, the per-field resolver pattern leads to certain unexpected issues when used naively. This is the case with data loading. The problem is that resolvers live in their own little world (In fact, can even be executed in parallel along others). This means a resolver with data requirements has no idea if this data has been loaded before, or if it will be loaded after. For example, three resolvers that need to load a certain user could end up making the same SQL query.
Most servers will actually resolve queries serially, meaning one field after the other. Take a look at the execution of a typical query that loads the current user’s name and age, all their friends, as…
