StepZen Community Update May 2022
Published: 2022-05-07 11:57:04

What's new with StepZen this month? Every first Thursday of the month, the StepZen team shares the latest updates to StepZen in a livestream. This month's update includes a PlanetScale integration, a tutorial contributed from the community, federation for GraphQL, and a sneak peek at new product updates coming next month!

> Watch a recording of the [May 2022 Community Update on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfz-aesw0As).

PlanetScale integration
-----------------------

With StepZen, you can create a GraphQL API for your existing data sources in minutes and deploy it in seconds. One of those data sources is MySQL databases, which you can import using `stepzen import mysql` with our CLI. This command also lets you import a PlanetScale database, a MySQL-compatible database that you can use in the cloud. PlanetScale allows you to create a serverless database based on Vitess, an open-source project that is powering tools like Slack and New Relic.

Read the full blog post explaining how to set up PlanetScale and import a MySQL database in [Instant GraphQL API for PlanetScale with StepZen](https://stepzen.com/blog/instant-graphql-api-planetscale-stepzen). Or find the code in our [examples repository](https://github.com/stepzen-dev/examples) on Github.

Community tutorial
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We have a new community tutorial this month, written by [Victory Nwani](https://github.com/vickywane). In this tutorial, he shows how to build a fullstack GraphQL application using StepZen and Svelte. StepZen is used to make the GraphQL backend by importing REST API endpoints from AlpacaDB using `stepzen import curl`. As AlpacaDB has no GraphQL API, this is a perfect way to use GraphQL in your frontend application without setting up a complete GraphQL API with code yourself. One of the latest popular front-end frameworks, Svelte, is used to create the JavaScript frontend.

You can find a link to the tutorial [here](https://stepzen.com/blog/building-a-stock-trading-app-with-stepzen-and-alpacadb), and the complete source code is available in [this Github repository](https://github.com/vickywane/stepzen-alpaca-graphql-svelte).

Using StepZen for federation
----------------------------

Federation is becoming more and more popular amongst larger enterprises to set up a "graph of graphs" for their organization. Using StepZen, you can declaratively create subgraphs and sssemble them in a unified graph of graphs (or supergraph). You can create graphs for your existing non-GraphQL services using the StepZen CLI (`stepzen import mysql|postgresql|curl`) and connect them with any service that's using GraphQL already. You can use a set of custom directives (`@materializer` and `@sequence`) to combine data from different subgraphs declaratively. To learn more about using StepZen for federation, go to our [federation product page](https://stepzen.com/product/federation) or watch the [walkthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKNCUC9H6nA) on YouTube.

What's next?
------------

We're adding more and more features to StepZen. Next month you can expect more product features that will help you build a GraphQL API faster using declarative code. Keep an eye out for our latest developments on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/stepzen_dev) or [join our Discord community](https://discord.gg/9k2VdPn2FR) to stay updated. The next StepZen Community Update will be hosted on the first Thursday of June, meaning June 2nd. Livestreamed on YouTube and Twitch, or watch the recording afterward.