refinery VS sqlx

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

For PostgreSQL, the most relevent part of the code is here. With this in mind I changed some things around to rely on schemas instead of databases and even simplified some parts of the implementation as this was always meant to be for internal use only..

What exactly are you missing? I haven't really written "boring corporate backend stuff" in a few years but something like sqlx provides everything I've ever needed there.

Badges are the little rectangles you typically see at the top of a crate's README: https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/blob/main/README.md

SQLX has entered the chat [1].

[1] https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx

Database : SqLite (using sqlx).

The current (well, removed) MSSQL sqlx driver also doesn't support encrypted connections (https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/issues/1552), so it might work locally on an unnamed instance but not over the network until they add in the newer driver (which will be closed source but for an OSS project you should be able to request a free license I think)

I'm considering making my own wrapper over lower-level database drivers. There are a lot of features in sqlx that I don't need, and the latest version seems to have removed useful data structures that SQLPage is using. It also removed support for SQL Server.

add Ed25519 to AuthPlugin enum on https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/blob/061fdcabd72896d9bc3abb4ea4af6712a04bc0a8/sqlx-core/src/mysql/connection/auth.rs and implement them using these crates: