Even in slow Ruby, querying to fulfill the request from MySQL is an order of magnitude slower than parsing it, making a speed jump not worth much effort. I'd love to have it backed by a db so fast that parsing time matters.

Absolutely, if you're building a GraphQL server, parsing is almost certainly not your bottleneck. Stellate is effectively a GraphQL CDN, so for us, it is.

Our request flow effectively boils down to:

1. Parsing a GraphQL query to assess which types and fields are within it

2. Matching the configured cache rules to those types and fields

3. Caching partial results accordingly

So, for our specific use case, parsing is one of the main things our edge gateway does, and reducing overhead there allowed us to significantly improve our overall performance.