# Who's new in July, 2020

**URL:** <https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522>\
**Category:** Users\
**Tags:** welcome\
**Created:** [July 4, 2020, 1:16am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522 "2020-07-04T01:16:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mrjn](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/mrjn/32/775_2.png) [@mrjn](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/mrjn)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2020, 1:16am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/1 "2020-07-04T01:16:28Z")

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I think sometimes it can be a bit unnerving to join a new community and not know what all the rules and regulations are. Don’t be shy. If you’re new here, feel free to say Hi and introduce yourself to the community on this thread.

Cheers,  
Manish

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**Author:** ![mrjn](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/mrjn/32/775_2.png) [@mrjn](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/mrjn)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2020, 1:16am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/2 "2020-07-04T01:16:46Z")

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**Author:** ![dmitry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/0ea827/32.png) [@dmitry](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/dmitry)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2020, 7:23am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/3 "2020-07-05T07:23:59Z")

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Guess i’ll start this thread off! Hi my name is Dmitry 🙂 I’m currently building a social network of sorts with Dgraph! I’ve been here for quite some time, even back when Dgraph was pretty unstable and slow. But i’ve stuck with the community, and i’m so happy that Dgraph is finally much more stable, and usable (without tons of errors, bugs). The most amazing part of Dgraph I think, is that you guys have built everything that it needs to be as performant as possible, from scratch. (BadgerDB and Ristretto for example) Another great aspect is that everything is open source! The community is able to contribute, and help fix bugs at a faster rate, compared to other graph database technologies!

To be frank; I have decided on building out my application with GraphQL± and the Dgo library, rather than going with the baked in GraphQL features, just because I think it’s alot more stable and feature rich. I think the GraphQL functionality has come a long way, and it’s going to be pretty great in the future, but at this time i’m not ready to go all in on it just yet (Partly because custom resolver support isn’t 100% there just yet - I don’t want to be making external HTTP Requests).

I’m pretty hyped about the future of “Slash GraphQL”. I think it would be better named “Dgraph Cloud”, but at the same time I understand why you guys want GraphQL in the name (It’s kind of a buzz word I guess). I’m not ready just yet to get started with it, because i’m interested in utilizing some of the Enterprise features you guys have like encryption, backups, ACL’s and more. But I know that you guys are going to eventually support all of them, so that’s great!

After all of this time, you would probably think i’m an expert at Dgraph by now, but i’m still kinda of a noob. Been in the planing stages of my platform for quite some time… and I know it’s time to dive right into the building portion now. So you should see me a bit more active in the community here, and see me filing more issues on Github 😛

The team here at Dgraph has been support supportive and shoutout to @dmai especially, as I would see him on Slack trying to answer 100 questions at a time, and answered a ton of my questions as well. I know that takes a lot of dedication and work, and I know the community is super appreciative. But also a thanks to the rest of the team who answers questions here on the forum, and who have helped out in the community before!

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**Author:** ![Anurag](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/anurag/32/2599_2.png) [@Anurag](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/Anurag)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2020, 7:46am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/4 "2020-07-05T07:46:15Z")

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> [@dmitry](#):
>
> After all of this time, you would probably think i’m an expert at Dgraph by now, but i’m still kinda of a noob. Been in the planing stages of my platform for quite some time… and I know it’s time to dive right into the building portion now.

Sure, we would love that. You can also create discuss post with your thoughts on schema and design, and we would try to chime in.

> [@dmitry](#):
>
> shoutout to @dmai especially, as I would see him on Slack trying to answer 100 questions at a time

@dmai is our hero!

> [@dmitry](#):
>
> But also a thanks to the rest of the team who answers questions here on the forum, and who have helped out in the community before!

❤

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**Author:** ![midoc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f0a364/32.png) [@midoc](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/midoc)\
**Post date:** [July 16, 2020, 11:15pm UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/5 "2020-07-16T23:15:48Z")

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Hi there, my name is Sivaram. I am a Physician informaticist and work mainly in the Ontology and Knowledge engineering space. So I come from a semantic web background and have been exploring graph data stores for a while now. Recently came across Dgraph, and love what you guys have done with it, especially the native RDF support. Yeah, and the GraphQL thing too. 🙂

Its only been a few days, but **so far the things I liked about Dgraph are** :

- Support for RDF data.
- Schema is inferred from the ingested data.
  - Type system (similar to ontology Class)
  - Global predicates

- ACID transactions
- Ratel is an awesome tool for schema management, query, mutations - haven’t explored the rest of functionality in it. 🙂
- GraphQL for schema validation
- GraphQL± syntax (prefer it over GraphQL syntax)
- Great documentation

and **some things that feel weird** are:

- GraphQL can be used to describe the Schema, but the predicates automatically get the Type they are associated with. E.g. if Types **Person** and **Organization** both have a _name_ predicate, then 2 predicates are created - _Person.name_ and _Organization.name_, which is different from the global predicate native to Dgraph. (my preference is for the global predicate - similar to how it is in the semantic web world where namespaces are used but these are not tied to the Classes).
- Lack of ‘_select \* …_’ to retrieve everything about an entity. I did see a raging war going on in a thread on this topic …
  - Found ‘_expand(all)_’ but this only returns predicates which have scalar values. If a predicate references an object it is not returned. I can understand the rationale for not returning the entire object, but at least the ID(s) of the object(s) can be returned.

Still digging my way through the documentation, and a long way to go … so maybe I will be changing my mind on some of these as I learn more. 🙂

Finally, thank you for creating a great product!!

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**Author:** ![donovan](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/donovan/32/3989_2.png) [@donovan](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/donovan)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2020, 4:30am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/6 "2020-07-20T04:30:39Z")

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👋 Howdy folks! I’ve been using Dgraph for toy projects for a while (love its speed and ease of setup, and I’m a Go programmer myself so appreciate its technology stack). However, I recently started on a project where I might be able to use Dgraph for a serious project. It turns out this has also been a chance to try to understand GraphQL, and I’m interested in using Dgraph+GraphQL for shortening the time it takes to get a product off the ground (the notion of being able to generate a functional client API straight from a GraphQL schema is intriguing indeed!)

So, I’m a bit new to GraphQL (in fact, I was familiar with graph databases before GraphQL came along and so found myself very confused by the use of the word “Graph” in GraphQL, since it seems to really just be an updated take on REST – which is great, it has some nice features, but just has a super confusing name to me 😕)

Looking forward to some of the upcoming features on Dgraph!

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**Author:** ![gorillastanley](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/gorillastanley/32/4518_2.png) [@gorillastanley](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/gorillastanley)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2020, 4:34am UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/whos-new-in-july-2020/7522/7 "2020-07-24T04:34:15Z")

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Hello. I’m completely new to Dgraph.
