Inside Facebook

Yesterday, Facebook announced that they had updated the power of FQL (Facebook Query Lanugage) with respect to batching FQL API calls together. Developers already familiar with SQL languages will certainly appreciate this update, as the new query syntax is akin to the logic used in these other languages. Essentially, Facebook is now allowing developers to batch FQL calls together, and reference columns in earlier queries to mimic standard SQL “INNER JOIN” functionality.

Facebook has already provided examples of where this might be useful. The overarching theme of these examples are:

1. Build an initial query to get user IDs in a certain scenario
2. Utilize these user IDs to get information about those users

These two steps are required in almost every significant FQL application, and traditionally required two separate API calls to get the necessary user information. Now, however, Facebook is allowing developers to combine these steps (and as many more as you can think of) into a single API call. This significantly speeds up API calls, even more so than the existing best-practice of using batch.run. The new best practice is to utilize the fql.multiquery API call.

This is the first time that we’ve seen one API method gain more power than another. Traditionally, FQL offered the same amount of power and flexibility as simply using regular API calls such as stream.get and user.getinfo. Now that developers can combine FQL queries into one API transaction, developers would be wise to utilize FQL in their more complex API interactions.