There is value in both, at Fauna we provide GraphQL out the box. Using Fauna directly would eliminate an indirection and is probably slightly more efficient. However, if there is a GraphQL layer like Prisma in between you could essentially change to any database with less impact on your application. This is tremendously interesting for people who develop frameworks, using prisma gives them the advantage of supporting multiple databases immediately. Or for application developers it could allow you to move from a non-scalable database to a scalable database once it becomes necessary or simply just switch databases if the database maintenance is causing you grief. I'm for one looking forward to Prisma supporting Fauna since if the interface is the same, there are even less reasons not to choose a scalable managed database instead of managing your own db :). And I would say that Prismas interface is quite great!
Note: the performance impact does depend heavily on whether your database maps well on ORMs. Traditional databases have an impedance missmatch when it comes to translating tables to an objet format. Graph databases or the way Fauna works (documents with relations and map/reduce-like joins) map well on ORMs so the performance impact would be small.
Note: the performance impact does depend heavily on whether your database maps well on ORMs. Traditional databases have an impedance missmatch when it comes to translating tables to an objet format. Graph databases or the way Fauna works (documents with relations and map/reduce-like joins) map well on ORMs so the performance impact would be small.