Knex VS kysely

Knex.js

AdonisJS core team has created/maintains Lucid. It is a SQL query builder, and an Active Record ORM built on top of Knex.

Now, why not use an ORM? I've seen performance issues too many times with ORMs. I prefer writing my own SQL to avoid surprises. After all, I know the database schema and writing code for a specific purpose very often leads to better performance than generic code. ORMs have to support all kinds of database schemas. I only have to support mine. Having successfully used Knex.js in NodeJS (a popular query builder) in the past, I know writing SQL queries myself is not hard and provides very good performance.

Given the dynamic nature of the schema, we employ Knex, a query builder, for database access.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/knex - 779 issues

# related: https://github.com/knex/knex/issues/2354

This article will be focused on a security issue that I found in Knex and how to mitigate it, but I'll also talk briefly about the social aspects of this problem.

SQL is an old, irregular language to work with, but it is better known than HCL and SQL already has it's own Pulumi/CDK in the form of every ORM with introspection (like Javascript's Prisma, Python's Django, Go's XO etc) and QueryBuilder (LINQ, Knex, etc) in whatever programming language you prefer. You probably already know it.

Did you check https://github.com/koskimas/kysely ? It was great when I used it. It has great TS support.

That’s where Kysely comes to the rescue: Kysely is a type-safe and devX-friendly typescript SQL query builder. It was designed to work with PostgreSQL and MySQL, but it exposes a few classes that can let us write queries without being connected to an actual relational database.

prisma (mentioned in the article), zapatos, pgtyped and kysely are the most popular currently I think.

switch between a limited interface and a query builder (MikroORM, TypeORM). This feels like using two different libraries, switching between two different sets of limitations. Kysely is a nice query builder with good TS support, but MikroORM is using Knex instead so you're losing TS, and TypeORM has a custom query builder, less user-friendly than Knex.

I'd love to see Kysely as an option.

Kysely[1] and zapatos[2] are excellent solutions for type-safe typescript query builders. It’s hard to go back to the days of spending 20-30% of your time in the object mapping layer.

[1] https://github.com/koskimas/kysely

Querying the database (PostgreSQL) should not be ground breaking. Personally I like to have full type-safety so we can easily catch bugs during the development time without introducing any tests that are just testing the data type from our datastore to match the data type our API expects. I like to go database schema first, which means that we generate types from the database schema and work with those. Any change to the schema of the database is made with SQL migrations and after that, the typescript types are regenerated. Another approach is to use a code-first tool like TypeORM or Prisma. However in my experience such tools often produce not efficient SQL queries and are less easy to extend. In my projects I use library kysely (https://github.com/koskimas/kysely) with kysely-codegen (https://github.com/RobinBlomberg/kysely-codegen) to have a full type-safe SQL builder.