potygen VS Knex

I really hope the community converges on just one common solution to this as I see soo many different approaches to the same “there’s no great modular ORM for typescript” problem.

I myself went the route of “lets just have raw sql queries” but extract distinct and specific types from them automatically- https://github.com/potygen/potygen

Great thing is that it handles sql of any complexity - CTEs, views, nested selects/joins/unions/custom functions you name it. All tools you can use to encapsulate logic in sql itself (what ORM were supposed to be for) and then have it be statically validated at compile time thus saving you the need for righting all those trivial unit tests that was also one of the key benefits of ORMs.

Admittedly if there was something like LINQ I would probably not have ventured into building potygen, but I’m glad I did as I learned so much about SQL as a language and what it had to offer - its silly how much logic I used to rely on writing in code that could easily be handled by sql in a much mode concise way.

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.