While it doesn't have to be tied to your schema, it provides too much flexibility. I worked on an API that provided a data graph-type of way to fetch desired da

While it doesn't have to be tied to your schema, it provides too much flexibility. I worked on an API that provided a data graph-type of way to fetch desired data. The problem quickly became that we were not able to predict the exact paths provided which made it very difficult to tailor the performance. We didn't realize this early, but as the API usage grew, we realized the flexibility was a mistake. The article mentions pre-processing the graph to determine complexity, some caching, and some timeouts. This is not good enough and can/will be worked around. Inflexible API's with (mostly) single, predictable paths to data provide a great way to tailor performance at the (IMO) negligible cost of extra HTTP requests.