kysely VS Knex

Hello HN! I was recently introduced to Kysely (https://github.com/kysely-org/kysely), a type-safe Typescript SQL query builder, and instantly fell in love! I got inspired and wanted to make something similar for AWS DynamoDB.

Thus, I developed Tsynamo! Instead of calling it type-safe, I decided to go with type-friendly, because the library is still in an early stage, and is not 100% type-safe.

Under the hood, Tsynamo compiles the built queries into AWS SDK v3 commands. I feel that Tsynamo simplifies the AWS SDK API quite a lot since the developer doesn't have to mess around with condition/filter expressions or attribute names/values themselves, and as a bonus gets autocompletion for building the queries!

There's also a playground to test it out in your browser: https://try.tsynamo.dev. It might not have the most up-to-date API of the library in use yet, but you can get the library's main idea from there.

Since the project is still in its early stages, it doesn't yet have 100% support for all DynamoDB features, like querying indexes. The next steps will be increasing the support coverage and perhaps adding automatic type generation as inspired by kysely-codegen (https://github.com/RobinBlomberg/kysely-codegen).

Would love to get some feedback, thanks in advance!

How does this compare with my current favorite lite sqlite wrapper kysely? https://kysely.dev/

ORMs suck, but raw SQL embedded in your code sucks too.

This might be good time to plug my TypeScript non-ORM: https://jawj.github.io/zapatos/.

I should say I also like what I've seen of https://kysely.dev/ and https://pgtyped.dev/.

As we can see using Kysely with Nextjs is very simple, and it allows us to create queries in a simple way, create tables, create migrations, transactions, etc.

I've switched to kysely (https://kysely.dev) to just build SQL instead and it's nice to have full SQL access but still be type safe to my schema. Enjoying it so far.

Kysely looks like the thing most people would want. It's not a full ORM though - just a well-typed query builder.

https://kysely.dev/

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.