

And although this is more easily done in the Dataweave language, it can be simplified even further using GraphQL.ĭataGraph lets you define a unified schema (a data description that spans multiple data sources) in a graphical manner using assets already published in Exchange, removing the need to manually do this activity. Without DataGraph, when a MuleSoft developer needs to retrieve related data from multiple systems they have to execute multiple API invocations and manually merge the data based on foreign key relationships between the various data sets. Read reports Does DataGraph replace API-led design?Ībsolutely not! Instead, DataGraph is intended to work with your existing System and Process APIs. More specifically, DataGraph is meant to be an easy-to-use GUI for defining the relationships between multiple data sources. Instead, DataGraph is meant to enhance how GraphQL is incorporated into the SDLC by tightly integrating the user experience with other parts of Anypoint Platform. GraphQL is a very potent query system, so why did MuleSoft feel the need to develop DataGraph? Before we can answer that, let’s examine what DataGraph is and isn’t in the first place.Īnypoint DataGraph is not a replacement for GraphQL. GraphQL allows developers to retrieve data from many possible sources in a single call in such a way that the results are predictable and are strongly typed, meaning that the caller will know exactly what types of data will be returned. Enhancements to the language specification have also occurred over the years with the most recent change being the incorporation of the GraphQL Schema Definition Language (SDL) being incorporated into the specification in 2018. Since it’s initial development in 2012, it has been released in 2015 to the open source community via the GraphQL Foundation (which is hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation). Therefore, when Facebook rewrote their News API to support a complete rewrite of the mobile application, they decided that a new approach to data retrieval would be required - GraphQL was the result.

Instead, there are a lot of data interdependencies with other parts of the Facebook ecosystem that are not easily accessible using traditional REST API approaches.

News stories, in particular, were especially challenging because a user cannot just retrieve the news article, who wrote it, and other information about it. GraphQL was started by Facebook due to the challenges it was facing with highly interconnected data. In this article, we will provide a brief overview of DataGraph and discuss how it differs from GraphQL. DataGraph allows customers to innovate faster by consuming data from multiple APIs in a single request. In June 2021, MuleSoft announced the first GA release of DataGraph as an addition to Anypoint Platform.
