Data Loaders (N+1)

Data loaders solve the N+1 problem while loading data.

The N+1 Problem Explained

Say you query for a list of movies, and each movie includes some data about the director of the movie. Also assume that the Movie and Director entities are owned by two different services. In a naïve implementation, to load 50 movies, you would have to call the Director service 50 times: once for each movie. This totals 51 queries: one query to get the list of movies, and 50 queries to get the director data for each movie. This obviously wouldn’t perform very well.

It would be much more efficient to create a list of directors to load, and load all of them at once in a single call. This first of all must be supported by the Director service, because that service needs to provide a way to load a list of Directors. The data fetchers in the Movie service need to be smart as well, to take care of batching the requests to the Directors service.

This is where data loaders come in.

What If My Service Doesn’t Support Loading in Batches?

What if (in this example) DirectorServiceClient doesn’t provide a method to load a list of directors? What if it only provides a method to load a single director by ID? The same problem applies to REST services as well: what if there’s no endpoint to load multiple directors? Similarly, to load from a database directly, you must write a query to load multiple directors. If such methods are unavailable, the providing service needs to fix this!

Implementing a Data Loader

The easiest way for you to register a data loader is for you to create a class that implements the org.dataloader.BatchLoader or org.dataloader.MappedBatchLoader interface. This interface is parameterized; it requires a type for the key and result of the BatchLoader. For example, if the identifiers for a Director are of type String, you could have a org.dataloader.BatchLoader<String, Director>. You must annotate the class with @DgsDataLoader so that the framework will register the data loader it represents.

In order to implement the BatchLoader interface you must implement a CompletionStage<List<V>> load(List<K> keys) method.

The following example is a data loader that loads data from an imaginary Director service:

package com.netflix.graphql.dgs.example.dataLoader;

import com.netflix.graphql.dgs.DgsDataLoader;
import org.dataloader.BatchLoader;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletionStage;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

@DgsDataLoader(name = "directors")
public class DirectorsDataLoader implements BatchLoader<String, Director> {

    @Autowired
    DirectorServiceClient directorServiceClient;

    @Override
    public CompletionStage<List<Director>> load(List<String> keys) {
        return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> directorServiceClient.loadDirectors(keys));
    }
}

The data loader is responsible for loading data for a given list of keys. In this example, it just passes on the list of keys to the backend that owns Director (this could for example be a [gRPC] service). However, you might also write such a service so that it loads data from a database. Although this example registers a data loader, nobody will use that data loader until you implement a data fetcher that uses it.

Implementing a Data Loader With Try

If you want to handle exceptions during fetching of partial results, you can return a list of Try objects from the loader. The query result will contain partial results for the successful calls and an error for the exception case.

package com.netflix.graphql.dgs.example.dataLoader;

import com.netflix.graphql.dgs.DgsDataLoader;
import org.dataloader.BatchLoader;
import org.dataloader.Try;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletionStage;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

@DgsDataLoader(name = "directors")
public class DirectorsDataLoader implements BatchLoader<String, Try<Director>> {

    @Autowired
    private DirectorServiceClient directorServiceClient;

    @Override
    public CompletionStage<List<Try<Director>>> load(List<String> keys) {
        return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> keys.stream()
                .map(key -> Try.tryCall(() -> directorServiceClient.loadDirectors(keys)))
                .collect(Collectors.toList()));
    }

}

Provide as Lambda

Because BatchLoader is a functional interface (an interface with only a single method), you can also provide it as a lambda expression. Technically this is exactly the same as providing a class; it’s really just another way of writing it:

@DgsComponent
public class ExampleBatchLoaderFromField {
    @DgsDataLoader(name = "directors")
    public BatchLoader<String, Director> directorBatchLoader = keys -> CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> directorServiceClient.loadDirectors(keys));
}

MappedBatchLoader

The BatchLoader interface creates a List of values for a List of keys. You can also use the MappedBatchLoader which creates a Map of key/values for a Set of values. The latter is a better choice if you do not expect all keys to have a value. You register a MappedBatchLoader in the same way as you register a BatchLoader:

@DgsDataLoader(name = "directors")
public class DirectorsDataLoader implements MappedBatchLoader<String, Director> {

    @Autowired
    DirectorServiceClient directorServiceClient;

    @Override
    public CompletionStage<Map<String, Director>> load(Set<String> keys) {
        return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> directorServiceClient.loadDirectors(keys));
    }
}

Using a Data Loader

The following is an example of a data fetcher that uses a data loader:

@DgsComponent
public class DirectorDataFetcher {

    @DgsData(parentType = "Movie", field = "director")
    public CompletableFuture<Director> director(DataFetchingEnvironment dfe) {

        DataLoader<String, Director> dataLoader = dfe.getDataLoader("directors");
        String id = dfe.getArgument("directorId");

        return dataLoader.load(id);
    }
}

The code above is mostly just a regular data fetcher. However, instead of actually loading the data from another service or database, it uses the data loader to do so. You can retrieve a data loader from the DataFetchingEnvironment with its getDataLoader() method. This requires you to pass the name of the data loader as a string. The other change to the data fetcher is that it returns a CompletableFuture instead of the actual type you’re loading. This enables the framework to do work asynchronously, and is a requirement for batching.

Using the DgsDataFetchingEnvironment

You can also get the data loader in a type-safe way by using our custom DgsDataFetchingEnvironment, which is an enhanced version of DataFetchingEnvironment in graphql-java, and provides getDataLoader() using the classname.

@DgsComponent
public class DirectorDataFetcher {

    @DgsData(parentType = "Movie", field = "director")
    public CompletableFuture<Director> director(DgsDataFetchingEnvironment dfe) {

        DataLoader<String, Director> dataLoader = dfe.getDataLoader(DirectorsDataLoader.class);
        String id = dfe.getArgument("directorId");

        return dataLoader.load(id);
    }
}

The same works if you have @DgsDataLoader defined as a lambda instead of on a class as shown here. If you have multiple @DgsDataLoader lambdas defined as fields in the same class, you won't be able to use this feature. It is recommended that you use getDataLoader() with the loader name passed as a string in such cases.

Note that there is no logic present about how batching works exactly; this is all handled by the framework! The framework will recognize that many directors need to be loaded when many movies are loaded, batch up all the calls to the data loader, and call the data loader with a list of IDs instead of a single ID. The data loader implemented above already knows how to handle a list of IDs, and that way it avoids the N+1 problem.

Using Spring Features such as SecurityContextHolder inside a CompletableFuture

When you write async data fetchers, the code will run on worker threads. Spring internally stores some context, for example to make the SecurityContextHolder work, on the thread context however. This context wouldn’t be available inside code running on a different thread, which makes fetching the Principal associated with the request not work.

Spring Boot has a solution for this: it manages a thread pool that does have this context carry over. You can inject this solution in the following way:

@Autowired
@DefaultExecutor
private Executor executor;

You must pass in the executor as the second argument of the supplyAsync() method which is typically used to make data fetchers asynchronous.

@DgsData(parentType = "Query", field = "list_things")
public CompletableFuture<List<Thing>> resolve(DataFetchingEnvironment environment) {
 return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> {
    return myService.getThings();
}, executor);

Thread Pool Optimization

Using supplyAsync() without a second argument will cause the main work of a data loader to run on a common thread pool shared with most other async operations in your application. If that data loader is responsible for calling a slow service and/or subject to heavy load, the common thread pool could become fully saturated. In the worst case, this could result in application "freezes" as each data loader in the application awaits a free thread from the fixed-size common pool.

To account for this, IO-bound data loaders should instead maintain their own dedicated thread pool rather than use the common pool. When choosing a thread pool, it's recommended to review the options under the Executors Javadoc, but a safe default for IO bound workloads is usually Executors.newCachedThreadPool(). As opposed to the fixed-size common thread pool, Executors.newCachedThreadPool() will create new threads on-demand if all previously-created threads are saturated, but still prefers thread re-use when possible.

@Configuration
public class SlowDataLoaderConfiguration {
    @Bean(name = "SlowDataLoaderThreadPool")
    Executor slowDataLoaderExecutor() {
        return Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
    }
}

Individual Bean names combined with @Qualifier annotations will result in the proper executor being autowired to the corresponding data loader.

@DgsDataLoader(name = "slow")
public class SlowDataLoader implements MappedBatchLoader<String, Snail> {

    @Autowired
    @Qualifier("SlowDataLoaderThreadPool")
    Executor dedicatedExecutor;

    @Autowired
    DirectorServiceClient directorServiceClient;

    @Override
    public CompletionStage<Map<String, Snail>> load(Set<String> keys) {
        // This slow operation will now run on a dedicated thread pool instead of the common pool
        return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> directorServiceClient.loadSlowData(keys), dedicatedExecutor);
    }
}

Note that a custom executor will not carry Spring Security context automatically like the @DefaultExecutor would. Further documentation on passing Spring Security context between threads can be found in the Spring Security Concurrency docs.

Caching

Batching is the most important aspect of preventing N+1 problems. Data loaders also support caching, however. If the same key is loaded multiple times, it will only be loaded once. For example, if a list of movies is loaded, and some movies are directed by the same director, the director data will only be retrieved once.

Caching is Disabled by Default in DGS 1

Version 1 of the DGS framework disables caching by default, but you can switch it on in the @DgsDataLoader annotation:

@DgsDataLoader(name = "directors", caching=true)
class DirectorsBatchLoader implements BatchLoader<String, Director> {}

You do not need to make this change in version 2 of the DGS framework, because that version enables caching by default.

Batch Size

Sometimes it’s possible to load multiple items at once, but to a certain limit. When loading from a database for example, an IN query could be used, but maybe with the limitation of a maximum number of IDs to provide. The @DgsDataLoader has a maxBatchSize annotation that you can use to configure this behavior. By default it does not specify a maximum batch size.

Data Loader Scope

Data loaders are wired up to only span a single request. This is what most use cases require. Spanning multiple requests can introduce difficult-to-debug issues.