node-pg-migrate VS refinery

Why PG? For the clarity of the article to a large circle of developers, the entire explanation will be built by PostgreSQL and PG package. And in a real project, the database schema will change over time, and in order to be able to perform migrations, we will use Node PG migrate.

b) How you will manage schema migrations: every time you change tables, columns, foreign keys, every time you create or modify stored procedures, and so on, you need to do this through a migration. Here I'm at loss to recommend anything specific, but if you went with Prisma, I would read their docs and use whatever they are recommending you (if they actually recommend something). If you want something more neutral but still in the node ecosystem, node-pg-migrate might be the winner here? I'm not sure.

You’ll probably want something like this too: https://github.com/salsita/node-pg-migrate

You can use any normal DB migration tool. For k8s, I put the app's readiness probe to false, run the migrations and then toggle the probe back to true.

Here are some migration libraries:

Go - https://github.com/golang-migrate/migrate

Node - https://github.com/salsita/node-pg-migrate

Great write up! At PeerDB, we’ve been using refinery https://github.com/rust-db/refinery to handle database migrations of our catalog Postgres database from Rust. It is easy, typesafe and gets the job done. Thought this would be useful for users building apps with Rust!

I don't think migrations need to be tied to ORM. We have refinery that allows you to write migrations in rust. I, personally, didn't like and prefer writing them in SQL - why learn how to migrations in X when you already know the SQL dialect that you're using.

The best solution I've ever seen is this Rust library https://github.com/cornucopia-rs/cornucopia

You write plain SQL for you schema (just a schema.sql is enough) and plain SQL functions for your queries. Then it generates Rust types and Rust functions from from that. If you don't use Rust, maybe there's a library like that for your favorite language.

Optionally, pair it with https://github.com/bikeshedder/tusker or https://github.com/blainehansen/postgres_migrator (both are based off https://github.com/djrobstep/migra) to generate migrations by diffing your schema.sql files, and https://github.com/rust-db/refinery to perform those migrations.

Now, if you have simple crud needs, you should probably use https://postgrest.org/en/stable/ and not an ORM. There are packages like https://www.npmjs.com/package/@supabase/postgrest-js (for JS / typescript) and probably for other languages too.

If you insist on an ORM, the best of the bunch is prisma https://www.prisma.io/ - outside of the typescript/javascript ecosystem it has ports for some other languages (with varying degrees of completion), the one I know about is the Rust one https://prisma.brendonovich.dev/introduction

What I personally use here is Refinery, but it's within the Rust ecosystem. It lets you write your migrations in pure SQL - which is what I prefer - but still requires about 5 lines of boilerplate Rust code.

Example refinery migrations