JDBI VS Quill

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.

https://github.com/zio/zio-quill

This library does exactly what you prescribe. Pretty sure under the hood it's using macros with string templates

But I can connect to Postgress with something like Quill and run sophisticated queries to fetch data. Which then got me thinking, what is the difference between using Spark to connect to the database and using something like Quill or your normal pure JDBC driver?

Just as an example, say you are using quill ( https://getquill.io/ ) to query your database.

I think Quill is the closest to your request: https://github.com/zio/zio-quill

If this still looks like too much hassle, you can always go a bit higher-level and use something like Quill, which is also a powerful approach that uses a different, more ORM-like style.

I'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html) and in the backend with AWS lambdas.

The ecosystem is currently in the process of porting all the libraries to Scala 3. So if you're new to Scala, I'd recommend to start with Scala 2, which is rock-solid and already very powerful.

I never worked with SQLAlchemy. But on the scala database side, popular libraries are Doobie (https://tpolecat.github.io/doobie) and Quill (https://getquill.io). Keep in mind that these are for Scala on the JVM. On the ScalaJS side I'm using the javascript library pg. But I'd like to try if it works well with Prisma soon.

The nice thing about ScalaJS is, that you can use Javascript libraries. And if there are typescript facades, then you can transpile these to Scala and use them in a type safe way (https://scalablytyped.org).

I know that libraries like Scodec and shapeless were rewritten practically from scratch for Scala 3, taking advantage of the next syntax and internals, as well as protoquill - a Scala 3 implementation of Quill.

Akka HTTP, Cats, Quill, ninny, Monix Observable, mill.