json2jsii VS honeysql

The more I look at it, the more I think that Deno is actually a perfect fit for infrastructure as code.

The first reaction I get is usually "What, JavaScript!?". Here is why its better than it looks like.

Deno easily runs TypeScript without a compile step. TypeScript is a very mature, developer friendly language that was designed to model the super complicated types often seen in JS. This includes unions and intersections which help you model complex rules between optional properties, as well as template literal types which can help you restrict string constants. As it so happens, those same types of objects are present in our configurations.

TypeScript is also flexible about how much you'd like to model. Do you want only properties with really nice autocomplete with docs from the language server? Sure we can do just that. Do you want to only allow strings that look like a time duration for that property? Can be done too with template literal types. You choose where to invest your energy.

Building abstractions on top of IaC is seen as painful and obscure. TypeScript has tools to help you avoid that, such as api-extractor: https://api-extractor.com/ - it can enforce that all your function abstractions are documented and it can generate that documentation for you.

The larger ecosystem also comes with a lot of ready-made codegen tools that can help, from small modules such as json-schema-to-typescript (https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-schema-to-typescript) to larger mature projects such as jsii and https://github.com/cdklabs/json2jsii . They can be used to build the tooling to import things like CRDs and other external schemas.

What about running arbitrary code, launching rockets, turing completness? This is where Deno comes in, with its permissions model (https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/basics/permissions). You can allow only a subset of commands (lets say, `helm` and `kustomize`, while you're migrating away from them), a subset of (writable) directories, accessible network hosts - or none at all.

What about the pains of managing JS modules? Deno lets you import files directly from URLs. It also allows you to set private tokens in env vars to ensure the imports succeed: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/basics/modules/private - as a result, you can manage your IaC libraries the way that makes sense to you, without dealing with the unwieldy package managers of the node ecosystem.

I recall using korma way back I and I don’t recall it being terrible but I would say https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql has very much superseded it by this point… (but I can see how that might not be obviously clear if one is to look at superficial metrics like GitHub stars for example…)

Joins can certainly work in a data format like YAML. For an example, see Honey SQL from the Clojure community [0] (though without something to contrast strings like Clojure's keywords, you miss out on the automatic parameterization).

You mentioned moving JOINs around, so I'll mention that if represented as structured data, you can move any of the top level components around, so you could more closely follow the "true order of SQL" [1]. For example, I would love to be able to put FROM before SELECT in all or almost all cases. There's also being able to share and add to something like a complicated WHERE clause, where essentially all programming languages have built-in facilities for robustly manipulating ordered and associative data compared to string manipulation, which is not well-suited for the task.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't particularly care for YAML (though it doesn't bother me that much), but as someone who's done their fair share of programmatic SQL creation and manipulation in strings, not having a native way to represent SQL as data is a mistake in my opinion.

0: https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#big-complicated-exa...

In Clojure-land, we are also using HoneySQL [1] which has similar characteristics. You are still working within SQL semantics so it's a bit more complicated, but we are doing great complicated things with just maps, no API necessary.

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

using honeysql we can make structured queries as well

As someone else already pointed out, next.jdbc is good for database connectivity (for Postgres and beyond). For composing the queries themselves, I strongly recommend Honey SQL. It lets you represent queries themselves as normal Clojure data structures, just vectors and maps.

Perhaps you're looking for a way of arranging SQL as an AST represented by data structures (or objects) that can be fed to a compiler. HoneySQL[0] is one such implementation of this idea and it makes your general transformation trivial for Clojure programs. You don't need to mess around with string concatenation because you have a predictable and extensible compiler for data structures (which are themselves easily composable/transformable/storable with Clojure) that you can trust to do the right thing. If you're using some weird database or need an esoteric syntax, extending the compiler to your clause is easy to do[1].

[0] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#extensibility

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql (write SQL without having to write SQL)

I've used it from Clojure, via HoneySQL, so no ORM, no danger of SQL injection. It was really wonderful!

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

I used it to quickly iterate on the development of migration SQL scripts for a MySQL DB, which was running in production on RDS.

I might have switched to H2 DB later, because that was more compatible with MariaDB, but I could use the same Clojure code, representing the SQL queries, because HoneySQL can emit different syntaxes.