I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that this is exactly how Facebook's API used to work, before the era of the "Graph API". Your FQL queries ran against wh

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that this is exactly how Facebook's API used to work, before the era of the "Graph API". Your FQL queries ran against what appeared to be some sort of stripped-down MySQL instance. Most documentation seems to have been stripped from the web, but there's still a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Query_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Query_Language I used it. It was okay. I tended to prefer the boring REST api because it was simpler. From an API provider perspective, I much prefer REST or RPC apis just because it's far easier to get the security and performance implications right. "Less powerful" is a feature.