In situations where we want to load a large chunk of data at once, or we want to pull a lot of data from different tables, we can use what's known on Facebook as an FQL multiquery.
A multiquery is exactly what you might think—multiple FQL queries. They don't have to be related to each other, unlike subqueries, and they can each pull data from different FQL tables.
One of the original appeals for the FQL multiquery capability was the ability to perform what is now referred to as subqueries in FQL. Before this functionality was made available, there was presumably no other way for developers to perform complex subqueries. At present, the main attraction for using multiqueries is that they negate some of the overheads of making and managing multiple FQL requests, as all of the requests are packaged into a single request and single response.
In this recipe we're going to create a multiquery request to load information simultaneously about two tables—retrieving...