Event Store VS SqlKata Query Builder

I've been doing some research and found this: https://github.com/EventStore/EventStore

C#: In Europe, Java is still strong but many trading firms use C# because of the strong Microsoft culture in Europe, as well as because of strongly supported C# libraries like say EventStore, which tends to be used for the matchmaking engines for stock exchanges (especially that exchange matchmaking problem is basically SMR). And skimming over the code, it has Paxos implemented too, making it good for dealing with partial failures (failover), essential for any HFT/trading firm. C#'s also the biggest ecosystem that many of the breakthrough java tech mentioned earlier was first ported to.

Support for eventstore.com eventstore. esdb

Where's the catch, then? Well, there's a couple of catches, in fact. First of all, in a distributed setting, appending data to a log isn't that easy. First, you need to make your log distributed. Again, Kafka/Cassandra/EventStore make this possible, however, whenever you start dealing with distributed data, you‘re introducing new operational and implementation complexity.

SqlKata is your friend.

Don't know if can be a good pick for the no-ORM requirement but I would take a look at SqlKata which is a nice query builder + execution engine, built on top of Dapper

Not really an ORM. But I have been enjoying SqlKata recently. Works with Dapper but helps reduce SQL strings and makes things like pagination really easy. Also nice for dynamic filters.

That is basically the description of an object mapper, with all the guarantees of an object mapper :). It seems if you actually use the query builder as such, no guarantees exist.

I'm pretty picky regarding query builders and ORM's, to the extent of having written several of them over the years, in different languages (both dynamic and strong typed, unfortunately closed-source). I'm a strong advocate of schema-first design, and usually a query builder will allow you to design your queries explicitly, but having some internal behaviors (such as string concatenation, identifier quoting and automatic in-order separation of parameters and values to be bound) taken care of. As good examples of this, I'd mention golang's goqu (https://github.com/doug-martin/goqu) and - to some extent - C# SqlKata (https://sqlkata.com/). Following my frustrations with Python ORMs, I built my own toy project, sort-of-in-beta, called rickdb (https://github.com/oddbit-project/rick_db).

Less about the exact syntax and more about the tool, for example: https://github.com/sqlkata/querybuilder. I just chose that since it was on top of a search but the idea is the same. Your code generates raw SQL, so it's 100% interchangeable with writing SQL yourself however the builder library deals with the syntax, proper ordering, quoting, full attribute names, etc. Some such libraries even let you define your schema in code to make your SQL generation type safe.