refinery VS Prisma

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

In the world of software development, there are two kinds of developers: those who have never had to complain about ORMs and those who have actually used them. Whether it’s Django ORM for Python, Active Record for Ruby, GORM for Golang, Doctrine for PHP, or Prisma for TypeScript, a common issue persists: writing simple queries is straightforward, but constructing complex or optimized queries can take hours, if not days.

Support for a Union type #2505

generator client { provider = "prisma-client-js" binaryTargets = ["native", "rhel-openssl-1.0.x"] } datasource db { provider = "postgresql" // NOTE: When using mysql or sqlserver, uncomment the @db.Text annotations in model Account below // Further reading: // https://next-auth.js.org/adapters/prisma#create-the-prisma-schema // https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/api-reference/prisma-schema-reference#string url = env("DATABASE_URL") } model Post { id Int @id @default(autoincrement()) name String createdAt DateTime @default(now()) updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt createdBy User @relation(fields: [createdById], references: [id]) createdById String @@index([name]) } // ... rest of the schema

Unfortunately Prisma hasn’t supported polymorphism yet. As such, you can't use inheritance to model the entity in the same way as in your programming language, as depicted in the above class diagram. The good news is that we could intimate it using table inheritance to imitate it.

In this project I am manually declaring the data types. For better type-safety, use Prisma, which automatically generates types based on your database schema.

When you're creating a full-stack application, you'll also need to write logic to interact with your database. For relational databases like Postgres, you can do this with SQL, or an ORM like Prisma.

Prisma is a modern TypeScript-first ORM that allows you to manage database schemas easily, make queries and mutations with great flexibility, and ensure excellent type safety.

Prisma

There have been multiple feature requests to add native support for AsyncLocalStorage to Prisma, but they haven't been met with much enthusiasm from the maintainers. Some people solved it by extending and overriding the client (which is arguably prone to breaking with updates).