prisma-engines VS prisma1

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

I was surprised to see Prisma (a js library) listed, digging more I found out that they indeed had an Scala project which is now archived https://github.com/prisma/prisma1

For more: https://github.com/prisma/prisma1/issues/3830

Hey there, I'm Nikolas from the Prisma team. Just came here to quickly clarify this notion:

> Prisma is an API server that puts a GraphQL API in front of a DB.

Prisma is an ORM which generates a JavaScript/TypeScript client library for your database.

Your description is very true for Prisma 1 (which has been in maintenance mode for several years and is officially deprecated by now [1]), but the latest version(s) of Prisma (v2+) don't expose a GraphQL API any more. Prisma 1 also used GraphQL SDL for data modeling, the Prisma ORM on the other hand has its own, custom modeling language for describing database schemas in a declarative way and also comes with a flexible migration system.

That being said (and as Jens also mentioned elsewhere), the Prisma ORM does use GraphQL _internally_ as a wire protocol. However, as a developer, you _never_ touch this internal GraphQL layer and are not even supposed to be aware of it (you actually have to jump through a lot of hoops to even "find" it). It's also very likely that we'll replace GraphQL as a wire protocol in the future, so "GraphQL" really isn't something you should be thinking about as a developer who is using Prisma.

Hope that clarifies the situation a bit, let me know if you have any further questions around this topic.

[1] https://github.com/prisma/prisma1/issues/5208

Could you clarify this? Are you referring to the old Prisma 1 Cloud or the new Prisma Data Platform?

First released in 2019, Prisma is the newest ORM of the four we discussed. It will need time to get to a more mature state. Recently, the release of version 3 introduced a few breaking changes. There are also some existing issues noted in GitHub, such as that it does not support some Postgres column types.

Mongoose is quite a standard also open-source, but Prisma is an emerging modern solution that seems to take the cake.

Well, here comes Blitz, the agnostic monolith. Take the database, for example - Blitz comes out-of-the-box with Prisma 2. However, you're free to switch to another one like Fauna or DynamoDB. The same goes for the configuration; deciding a folder structure, defining routing conventions, selecting a styling library, and adding authorization and authentication are all set up by default, but that doesn't mean you cannot go your own way.

There is also a RealWorld port (Rakkas implementation of the RealWorld specification), a simple but complete fullstack application demonstrating how to approach building a REST API, accessing your database (via Prisma), handling authentication, testing, and more.

If you're into Typescript and prefer a code-first approach when working with databases, you'll be happy to learn about Prisma! Prisma is a next-generation Node.js and TypeScript ORM, that allows you to define a schema using a dedicated DSL so that you can then have all the comforts of modern development environments like intellisense, static type checking, automatic scaffolding and more.

It is a frontend framework, but with API routes and ORMs like https://www.prisma.io/ , you could use it as a complete stack in traditional sense I suppose.