libsqldb VS SqlKata Query Builder

> My current comfort zone is if I can find a query builder that has enough static typing that it has all of the keywords of my preferred SQL flavor, has prepared statements with placeholders- mainly for safety/security, and basically returns a string when you're done.

Some self-promotion (shameless, I know): https://github.com/lelanthran/libsqldb/tree/v1.0.0-rc2

I'm intending to rewrite it ("the first one is always to throw away" - I put too much unnecessary functionality into it and not enough RDBMS server backends) but I've used it in a few projects (use the latest branch) and am happy with it for postgres or sqlite usage.

See https://github.com/lelanthran/libsqldb/blob/v1.0.0-rc2/src/s... for example usage, but the basic premise is:

1. Send parameterised string to DB.

SqlKata is your friend.

Don't know if can be a good pick for the no-ORM requirement but I would take a look at SqlKata which is a nice query builder + execution engine, built on top of Dapper

Not really an ORM. But I have been enjoying SqlKata recently. Works with Dapper but helps reduce SQL strings and makes things like pagination really easy. Also nice for dynamic filters.

That is basically the description of an object mapper, with all the guarantees of an object mapper :). It seems if you actually use the query builder as such, no guarantees exist.

I'm pretty picky regarding query builders and ORM's, to the extent of having written several of them over the years, in different languages (both dynamic and strong typed, unfortunately closed-source). I'm a strong advocate of schema-first design, and usually a query builder will allow you to design your queries explicitly, but having some internal behaviors (such as string concatenation, identifier quoting and automatic in-order separation of parameters and values to be bound) taken care of. As good examples of this, I'd mention golang's goqu (https://github.com/doug-martin/goqu) and - to some extent - C# SqlKata (https://sqlkata.com/). Following my frustrations with Python ORMs, I built my own toy project, sort-of-in-beta, called rickdb (https://github.com/oddbit-project/rick_db).

Less about the exact syntax and more about the tool, for example: https://github.com/sqlkata/querybuilder. I just chose that since it was on top of a search but the idea is the same. Your code generates raw SQL, so it's 100% interchangeable with writing SQL yourself however the builder library deals with the syntax, proper ordering, quoting, full attribute names, etc. Some such libraries even let you define your schema in code to make your SQL generation type safe.