CODEWITHSUNDEEP
elasticsearchgraphqlelastic-stack
Mallikarjuna Budur
Mallikarjuna Budur

Reputation: 1

Anyone did a research on Elastic-search and GraphQL comparison?

I was trying to understand how Elastic-search compares with GraphQL when they try to solve similar purpose, or does GraphQL uses Elastic-search as a datasource? If anyone done further research share your understanding here ? Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1515

Answers (1)

Herku
Herku

Reputation: 7666

GraphQL is as the name suggests a query language (mostly for Web APIs). Elastic Search is a data store that exposes a "RESTful" interface. This interface also has some kind of a query language. In that sense they solve different problems:

GraphQL is for exposing data to web clients or apps. It is build to solve challenges faced in client server communication and app development. GraphQL tries to reduce the amount requests and the size of data sent between client and server. Furthermore it give you the ability to extend your API without versioning to keep old clients (e.g. old versions of your mobile app) working.

Elastic search is built to query large amounts of data effectively. Some of their prime use cases are advertised on their website. Usually you would not want to expose the elastic API directly to your client. GraphQL could act as a layer in between that restricts the operations allowed for clients and uses - as you said - elastic as a data source. Or maybe elastic search at some point likes GraphQL so much that they offer an API to write queries in GraphQL that would replace the REST API.

So now that we know that they solve different problems and can be used together, comparing them doesn't really make much sense.

Upvotes: 4

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