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A huge benefit that tools like Hasura, Postgraphile and PostgREST provide is using the native in-database row level security model. Consider Django. Your djan

A huge benefit that tools like Hasura, Postgraphile and PostgREST provide is using the native in-database row level security model. Consider Django. Your django app logs into the database typically as a user with elevated permission that is a superset of all permissions required by your users. Postgres has no idea that django is acting on behalf of many users, all it sees is this django super-like user. If an attacker roots your Django instance, they have the same privileges. If your PHB decides to "help" and log in with creds found in the source code, the damage could be catastrophic. Products like Hasura, Postgraphile and PostgREST switch databse roles on the fly per-request. The user that these tools logs in as typically has almost no privileges. You must be the bearer of a valid JWT token to elevate privileges, and then you only get to the level of the user you stole the token from. There is NO super-like user.

sfilipov 7y ago
> A huge benefit that tools like Hasura, Postgraphile and PostgREST provide is using the native in-database row level security model. I agree with your overall comment. Note that Hasura doesn't use the native row level security in Postgres. They implement the layer themselves. There are two reasons: 1) Hasura is older than the first release of Postgres that included the row level security feature. 2) Their implementation scales better when there are a lot of users subscribed to the same GQL Subscription. When using row level security, every user's query result looks different, so they need to create a database subscription / polling for each user GQL Subscription. Their implementation allows them to have a single PG subscription (well they mostly do polling), get all the data back, then strip down on the way out to the GQL subscribers.
djstein 7y ago
+1 for Django the Graphene implementation for Django brings up a Relay GraphQL server so fast. The best part is that at compile time it ensures your GraphQL schema confirms to the Relay standard, enforcing correct naming. You really don't have to think about much.

sfilipov 7y ago

> A huge benefit that tools like Hasura, Postgraphile and PostgREST provide is using the native in-database row level security model. I agree with your overall comment. Note that Hasura doesn't use the native row level security in Postgres. They implement the layer themselves. There are two reasons: 1) Hasura is older than the first release of Postgres that included the row level security feature. 2) Their implementation scales better when there are a lot of users subscribed to the same GQL Subscription. When using row level security, every user's query result looks different, so they need to create a database subscription / polling for each user GQL Subscription. Their implementation allows them to have a single PG subscription (well they mostly do polling), get all the data back, then strip down on the way out to the GQL subscribers.

djstein 7y ago

+1 for Django the Graphene implementation for Django brings up a Relay GraphQL server so fast. The best part is that at compile time it ensures your GraphQL schema confirms to the Relay standard, enforcing correct naming. You really don't have to think about much.