kysely VS @databases

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.

At Databases because you don't need ORM.

Depending on the complexity of your queries, Prisma might indeed not be the best abstraction for you. If you're proficient in SQL and don't want to sacrifice type-safety, there are really nice, low-level alternatives to Prisma such as Zapatos, Slonik or atdatabases. We're laying this out in our docs here: Should you use Prisma?

I built https://www.atdatabases.org to make this as easy as possible to get right when querying SQL databases with node.js

Depends a lot on the size of your database records. We’ve found that for a few tables with big JSONB columns it can make a huge difference but for 90% of queries it makes very little difference. https://www.atdatabases.org with @databases/pg-typed or @databases/mysql-typed also keeps the types in sync with which columns you select.

Since the method is marked as async, you can use await to get the results of a query (if your database library supports promises. For example with https://www.atdatabases.org as your db library you could do

I found Prisma close but not quite there. That's part of what motivated me to keep working on https://www.atdatabases.org, which I think is already there as an enterprise ready ORM for node.js

I built https://www.atdatabases.org which has an ORM for node.js, but also supports writing SQL queries in a safe way. It is type safe, and has much simpler & more flexible transaction support than most node.js ORMs.

If you’re using TypeScript and don’t have untrusted user data, @databases can generate static types, which can be a good alternative to runtime validation.

Did either of you consider @databases? It has pretty much the same approach to SQL as Slonik. I’m curious if there’s any reason why Slonik is preferable?