prisma-engines VS book

This is a very strange comment section. And this article is insanely poorly written.

> Last week, we completed a migration that switched our underlying database from MongoDB to Postgres.

Okay cool, but why? MongoDB is a very capable and fast database.

> It was a shock finding out that Prisma needs almost a “db” engine layer of its own. Read more about it here: https://www.prisma.io/docs/concepts/components/prisma-engine...

If you did any research on Prisma rather than diving in head-first, you'd realize this is a core part of why Prisma exists.

> we discovered that at a low level, Prisma was fetching data from both tables and then combining the result in its “Rust” engine. This was a path for an absolute trash performance.

Can you confirm this is actually the case? Can you show some benchmarks re: this claim? Or are you just assuming this is the case?

If you wish to auto-generate migrations, there are declarative schema change tools available for most relational databases. I'm the creator of Skeema [1] which provides them for MySQL, but there are options for other DBs too [2][3][4].

Prisma's migration system actually partially copied Skeema's design, while giving credit in a rather odd fashion which really rubbed me the wrong way: "The workflow of working with temporary databases and introspecting it to determine differences between schemas seems to be pretty common, this is for example what skeema does." [5]

While I doubt I was the first person to ever use that technique, I absolutely didn't copy it from anywhere, and it was never "pretty common". I'm not aware of any other older schema change systems that work this way.

[1] https://www.skeema.io

[2] https://github.com/djrobstep/migra

[3] https://github.com/k0kubun/sqldef

[4] https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...

[5] https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/blob/6be410e/migrat...

If you're serious about your review then you shouldn't ignore the fact that Prisma has a big blob of Rust code at its core, where other ORMs use standard database adapters from NPM. As someone who has maintained database adapters for other languages, let me tell you that the maintenance burden of that is quite significant. Especially if they ever want to support more advanced database features. If the company behind Prisma ever runs out of money, the project is probably toast.

prisma generate generates the code for the Prisma client. The code generated for the client is all JavaScript which calls into the “Prisma Engine” Rust native Node module to perform database operations. As others here have said, the Prisma Engine is pre-compiled by rustc via CI and gets dowloaded to your machine as a pre-built binary by npm, so there’s no need for you to build it yourself by running the Rust compiler locally.

Note: you may notice that it downloads some binaries when you first invoke this command. This is normal it fetches the node prisma cli and engines used by prisma. 😁

We solved this with flat vectors and just sharing index values in cheap walker objects. It is much nicer to work with compared to arc/weak pointers.

Code here: https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/tree/main/libs%2Fda...

Because Prisma Python currently interfaces with the Rust engine over HTTP (I am looking into changing this) and the Rust engines can be found here:

https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines

Thanks! I know of a couple Postgres tools that work in a declarative fashion: migra [1] and sqldef [2].

Migra is Postgres-specific. Its model is similar to Skeema's, in that the desired-state CREATEs are run in a temporary location and then introspected, to build an in-memory understanding of the desired state which can be diff'ed against the current actual state. (This approach was also borrowed by Prisma Migrate [3]). In this manner, the tool doesn't need a SQL parser, instead relying on the real DBMS to guarantee the CREATE is interpreted correctly with your exact DBMS version/flavor/settings.

In contrast, sqldef supports multiple databases, including Postgres and MySQL (among others). Unlike other tools, it uses a SQL parser-based approach to build its in-memory understanding of the desired state. As a DB professional, personally this approach scares me a bit, given the amount of nonstandard stuff in each DBMS's SQL dialect. But I'm inherently biased on this topic. And I will note sqldef's author is a core Ruby committer and JIT author, and is extremely skilled at parsers.

[1] https://databaseci.com/docs/migra

[2] https://github.com/k0kubun/sqldef

[3] https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/blob/main/migration...

Prisma 2 is a program, written in Rust that exposes a GraphQL API on top of your database of choice. Here's a link to the "engine": https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines

My first port of call was to google learn rust which lead me to "the book". The book is a first steps guide written by the rust community for newbies (or Rustlings as they're called) to gain a 'solid grasp of the language'.

Before Prodzilla, I’d read 'The Book' a couple of times, and had made my way through Rustlings, but hadn’t yet built a serious project in Rust.

To answer your last question;

Start with the Rust book.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Then do Rustlings until the syntax becomes muscle memory.

Then join the Discord and start doing little projects.

You won’t get up to the proficiency of other languages as quickly in Rust. It takes longer. For me it’s taking a lot longer, but I enjoy it.

Before diving into these repositories, familiarize yourself with Rust and its development ecosystem. The official Rust book is an excellent resource for developers at all levels. Each repository has documentation on how to contribute, covering code style, issue tracking, and pull requests.

This is my third Rust book after the official book and Rust in Action. The other two books are great, but they were too theoretical for me. I'm a slow learner and had much trouble grokking Rust's features and idiosyncrasies. When I was done with these books, I was lost and unsure of what I could do.

It's the same reason everything digital and downloadable isn't free: there's a cost to create it and there's a value to it.

For a language developer to charge for a book about that language, I think that's a completely valid way to make some money off of their work.

Even the Rust book, "The Rust Programming Language" is available freely online [0], but also as a print and ebook for sale via NoStarchPress [1].

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

[1] https://nostarch.com/rust-programming-language-2nd-edition

You know you can just read it online right now in 2 different variants It does contain some systems programming.

I am looking at The Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/), but hoped there was an amazing person on youtube.

Yeah, I'll build something, finally trying webassembly.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/