refinery VS postgres_migrator

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

Thanks! Yeah definitely agree that building out declarative table management for Postgres would be a major effort. A few open source projects I've seen in that area include:

https://github.com/sqldef/sqldef (Go)

https://github.com/bikeshedder/tusker (Python but being ported to Rust)

https://github.com/tyrchen/renovate (Rust)

https://github.com/blainehansen/postgres_migrator (Rust)

Some of these are based on parsing SQL, and others are based on running the CREATEs in a temporary location and introspecting the result.

The schema export side can be especially tricky for Postgres, since it lacks a built-in equivalent to MySQL's SHOW CREATE TABLE. So most of these declarative pg tools shell out to pg_dump, or require the user to do so. But sqldef actually implements CREATE TABLE dumping in pure Golang if I recall correctly, which is pretty cool.

There's also the question of implementing the table diff logic from scratch, vs shelling out to another tool or using a library. For the latter path, there's a nice blog post from Supabase about how they evaluated the various options: https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-cli#choosing-the-best-dif...

Forr postgres, how does the schema diffing aspect compare to migra?

https://github.com/djrobstep/migra

I'm asking because, although migra is excellent and there are multiple migrations tools based on it (at least https://github.com/bikeshedder/tusker and https://github.com/blainehansen/postgres_migrator), issues are piling up but development seem to be slowing down

Is this similar to migra? There's a tool written in Rust that calls it, postgres_migrator (there's also tusker)

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