edgedb VS Prisma

A new DB, with a new query language that's like "SQL done right"? This immediately reminded me of EdgeDB: https://edgedb.com/

Is there anyone here who knows enough about these two products to do a compare/contrast?

The whole thing consists of these main parts:

1. SQL parser: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/tree/master/edb/pgsql/parse...

>relational no-sql

Do you mean something like edgeDB?[0]

Or do you mean some non-declarative language completely? I don't see the latter making much sense. The issue with SQL for me is the "natural language" which quickly loses all intended readabilty when you have SELECT col1, col2 FROM (SELECT * FROM ... WHERE 1=0 AND ... which is what edgeDB is trying to solve.

[0]https://edgedb.com/

We need to land #3747, then something like this should work

You have to do your own optimiser to avoid, for instance, the N+1 query problem. (Just Google that, plenty of explanations around.) Many GraphQL frameworks have a “naive” subquery implementation that performs N individual subqueries. You either have to override this for each parent/child pairing, or bolt something on the back to delay all the “SELECT * FROM tbl_subquery WHERE id = ?” operations and convert them into one “… WHERE id IN (…)”. Sounds like a great use of your time.

In the end you might think to yourself “why am I doing this, when my SQL database already has query optimisation?”. And it’s a fair question, you are onto it. Try one of those auto-GraphQL things instead. EdgeDB (https://edgedb.com) does it as we speak, runs atop Postgres. Save yourself the enormous effort if you’re only building a GraphQL API for a single RBDMS, and not as a façade for a cluster of microservices and databases and external requests.

Or just nod to your boss and go back to what being a backend developer has always meant: laboriously building by hand completely ad hoc JSON versions of SQL RBDMS schemas, each terribly unhappy in its own way. In no way does doing it manually but presenting GraphQL deviate from this Sisyphean tradition.

I read in the article that NOT having GraphQL exactly match your DB schema is a best practice. My response is “did a backend developer write this?”

Same idea, yeah. Unfortunately, in our case we couldn't use pytest due to complicated test setup, so we used a customized unittest runner instead.

EdgeDB [1] has indeed a rich GraphQL layer, but it's a very different project.

While it also builds on top of Postgres, EdgeDB replaces the entire relational database front-end. EdgeDB features a SQL replacement language called EdgeQL (analytical capabilities of SQL married with deep-fetching in GraphQL), a higher-level data model (tables -> object types), integrated migrations engine, a custom protocol with great performance & great client APIs, and many other things. Read more here [2].

(disclaimer: I'm EdgeDB co-founder)

[1] https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb

[2] https://www.edgedb.com/blog/edgedb-1-0

I'm curious how this squares up with what someone linked elsewhere: https://github.com/edgedb/edgedb/discussions/3403

> EdgeDB does not treat Postgres as a simple standard SQL store. The opposite is true. To realize the full potential of the graph-relational model and EdgeQL efficiently, we must squeeze every last bit of functionality out of PostgreSQL's implementation of SQL and its schema.

This would seem to be an opposing view of how coupled EdgeDB and PostgreSQL are. Which is it?

generator client { provider = "prisma-client-js" binaryTargets = ["native", "rhel-openssl-1.0.x"] } datasource db { provider = "postgresql" // NOTE: When using mysql or sqlserver, uncomment the @db.Text annotations in model Account below // Further reading: // https://next-auth.js.org/adapters/prisma#create-the-prisma-schema // https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/api-reference/prisma-schema-reference#string url = env("DATABASE_URL") } model Post { id Int @id @default(autoincrement()) name String createdAt DateTime @default(now()) updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt createdBy User @relation(fields: [createdById], references: [id]) createdById String @@index([name]) } // ... rest of the schema

Unfortunately Prisma hasn’t supported polymorphism yet. As such, you can't use inheritance to model the entity in the same way as in your programming language, as depicted in the above class diagram. The good news is that we could intimate it using table inheritance to imitate it.

In this project I am manually declaring the data types. For better type-safety, use Prisma, which automatically generates types based on your database schema.

When you're creating a full-stack application, you'll also need to write logic to interact with your database. For relational databases like Postgres, you can do this with SQL, or an ORM like Prisma.

Prisma is a modern TypeScript-first ORM that allows you to manage database schemas easily, make queries and mutations with great flexibility, and ensure excellent type safety.

Prisma

There have been multiple feature requests to add native support for AsyncLocalStorage to Prisma, but they haven't been met with much enthusiasm from the maintainers. Some people solved it by extending and overriding the client (which is arguably prone to breaking with updates).

The DSL experience comes naturally to us as we have witnessed how well-designed language can greatly simplify programming tasks. We know it is challenging but not as difficult as many may feel. Therefore, we chose the schema-first design to create ZenStack toolkit on top of Prisma ORM that leverages code generation to significantly reduce the code developers need to write and make them move a lot faster.

Our products microservice is also straight forward just like how the auth has been. As previously plotted, we will be using different technologies on each service and we are using PostgreSQL as a database and prisma orm(Object Relational Mapper) for querying our DB. ORMs are used to translate between the data representations used by databases and those used in object-oriented programming, and in this service, we will be using one of the most common ones in the nodejs ecosystem, Prisma. It is the only fully type-safe ORM in the TypeScript ecosystem. The generated Prisma Client ensures typed query results even for partial queries and relations.