JDBI VS Slick

While this may work for greenfield applications, I don't see this working well for preexisting schemas. From their getting started page: "Database fields are automatically created for any abstract getter methods", which definitely scares me away since they seem to be relying on automatic field type conversions.

I prefer to manage my schemas when I can and do type and DAO conversions via mapper classes in the very simple and elegant JDBI framework where you write SQL annotations above your DAO methods https://jdbi.org/#_declarative_api

JDBI does wonders for wonky old schemas you've inherited, since joins etc work out of the box (just throw them in your annotations!) The annotations can also link to .SQL files for the big hairy queries.

All these "do magic" frameworks (hibernate being one of the first) work in the simple cases but then fall apart whenever you need to do anything complex/not-prescribed. I end up having to dig into the internals of the framework to see what's going wrong which negates their whole value add.

> I've been doing ORM on Java since Hibernate was new, and it has always sucked.

Have you ever looked at something like myBatis? In particular, the XML mappers: https://mybatis.org/mybatis-3/dynamic-sql.html

Looking back, I actually quite liked it - you had conditionals and ability to build queries dynamically (including snippets, doing loops etc.), while still writing mostly SQL with a bit of XML DSL around it, which didn't suck as much as one might imagine. The only problem was that there was still writing some boilerplate, which I wasn't the biggest fan of.

Hibernate always felt like walking across a bridge that might collapse at any moment (one eager fetch away from killing the performance, or having some obscure issue related to the entity mappings), however I liked tooling that let you point towards your database and get a local set of entities mapped automatically, even though codegen also used to have some issues occasionally (e.g. date types).

That said, there's also projects like jOOQ which had a more code centric approach, although I recall it being slightly awkward to use in practice: https://www.jooq.org/ (and the autocomplete killed the performance in some IDEs because of all the possible method signatures)

More recently, when working on a Java project, I opted for JDBI3, which felt reasonably close to what you're describing, at the expense of not being able to build dynamic queries as easily, as it was with myBatis: https://jdbi.org/

That said, with the multi-line string support we have in Java now, it was rather pleasant regardless: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/2-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-m...

I don't think there's a silver bullet out there, everything from lightweight ORMs, to heavy ORMs like Hibernate, or even writing pure SQL has drawbacks. You just have to make the tradeoffs that will see you being successful in your particular project.

I found JDBi[1] to be a really nice balance between ORM and raw SQL. It gives me the flexibility I need but takes care of a lot of the boilerplate. It's almost like a third category.

1. http://jdbi.org

You could use something like jdbi or mybatis. It's not as ugly as raw jdbc and easier to use without all of the gunk from an ORM like hibernate.

We use JDBI. Very simple and lightweight. It uses an object mapper not a full fledged ORM.

Alternatively there are... hybrid solutions like Kotlin's https://github.com/JetBrains/Exposed or https://jdbi.org/ that don't quite... do all the heavy lifting for querying but allow you to sorta stitch queries together manually.

As seems that Micronaut does not include anything similar by default, we use JDBI and that SQL to retrieve one random greeting from the greetings table.

Ah! E sobre o que eu usei no backend, alem de postgres e fly.io, o backend eh eh Java, usando um framework chamado quarkus e jdbi pra fazer a interface com o banco.

More personally, I'm not much an ORM guy. I've just never found that the benefits outweigh the costs, but that's just my opinion. That said, I don't use JDBC directly in my own projects anymore, strongly preferring to use JDBI instead. I find that it walks the line between "make using the database easier" and "get between you and the database" beautifully. But there's not a darn thing wrong with using JDBC directly.

Made a PR on slick to document this https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2760 (workaround is quite easy, you can just define def tupled = (apply _).tupled in the companion object of the case class and it will also compile for all Scala versions).

The Scala ecosystem has a few ways to do composable type-safe query building, e.g. Slick[0] or more recently Quill[1]. . I believe both also have ways to do compile-time string interpolation (e.g. sql"""select * from users where id = ${user.id}""") which generate prepared statements (I know Slick does prepared statements. Quill has similar macros but I haven't looked into how safe they are to use).

[0] https://scala-slick.org/

Release notes at https://github.com/slick/slick/releases/tag/v3.5.0-M3

With all this in mind, I landed at the first candidate: slick from https://scala-slick.org/ that you all probably know.

I think Slick's current priority is also getting in Scala 3 support: https://github.com/slick/slick/issues/2177

Future releases might not be announced here. To get notified, go to https://github.com/slick/slick, click the Watch dropdown button at the top, select Custom, check Releases, and click Apply.

https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2097 now I use slightly lower version of slick so this might be an upgrade that resolves (I do recall using it in 21 and it was still buggy and I filed a ticket, which I cannot find at the moment), but given a complex enough query (we have one in PROD which has tons of flexibility in terms of filters that can be passed in) but it also makes for complex code.

I started writing a reply but then I realized it would be long and depends on exactly what you mean, so maybe it's better to post the question in https://github.com/slick/slick/discussions/categories/questions?

I purchased the very entertaining book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. Although I found Haskell fascinating and tempting, I knew it was unrealistic to introduce it in our company. Scala on the other hand looked like it could be the holy grail: All the characteristics I was looking for, no need to abandon the JVM and its cornucopia of tools and libraries, and the possibility for coexistence with Java and therefore incremental adoption. After implementing some simple programs to identify any immediate risks of committing to the language and its ecosystem, I started to introduce Scala in customer projects. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to work with open-minded, curious, and ambitious team members who were also experienced enough to appreciate the benefits of the language. We immediately applied our experience with functional programming, and embraced immutability. Libraries like Slick and Akka HTTP (we actually started out with its predecessor, Spray) made building database-backed REST services a breeze. And the resulting code was robust and highly maintainable. Scala's expressive type system and type inference made it easy to build a restrictive, consistent domain model without bloating the code. There was virtually no overhead. Any boilerplate could be easily abstracted out. In the end, the application code felt natural, concise and elegant. Programming was fun again.