DAB Capabilities & Limitations

[nathanvoth]

Our organization is looking at using DAB to replace our in-house developed Enterprise Data API. Are there approaches to resolving the following business-critical limitations we have identified?

1. Ability to customize the relationships of the tables: The database will not have all relationships. In dab-config.json I am defining the relationships, but unclear if this results in similar behavior to EF Core and entity configurations or if there is more that can be done in terms of optimization.

2. Ability to define virtual fields or custom queries: Some of our applications require this for group by and I'm not clear how DAB would be able to generate such a query.

3. Performance: In my own testing, I found relationship queries performing more slowly when compared to our Enterprise Data API that uses Hot Chocolate (with progression) and EF Core. I believe this is due to the APPLY OUTER joins seen in the generated SQL. Our test scenario saw existing queries take under 500 ms compared to up to 8 secs using DAB against the same data source.

I love what DAB does do well, so perhaps these are just business cases it is not designed for. I just want to ensure I'm doing my due diligence to make sure this is not user error 👍