RxDB VS Prisma

I'm interested in this problem also!

I think there is a large overlap with projects that market/focus on offline-first experiences.

AFAIK this problem can be solved by:

1) Considering a client-side copy of the database that gets synced with the remote DB. This is an approach [PowerSync](https://www.powersync.com/) and [ElectricSql](https://electric-sql.com/) and [rxdb](https://rxdb.info/) take!

Hey, after I posted that, I went and gave a second look online to see if I could find something that would allow me to develop a local-first app with offline persistence and syncing capabilities.

I ended up finding some possibilities out there that could potentially help me build stuff. One of them is RxDB [1], which offers WebRTC syncing - you'd still need a signaling server, I suppose, but all sensitive information could be synced E2E-encrypted via WebRTC.

Then there's CRDT's [2], which is a universe that turned out to have multiple possibilities that match (at least partially) my needs. In particular, the next thing I want to take a look at is cr-sqlite [3], which might be just thing I needed to kick-off some side-projects.

I'm posting here cause I just found some hope of not needing to build a traditional client-server app and having to deal with all the hassle involved in securing a server (and with fear that my efforts could be not good enough), and I thought someone else could benefit from getting to know these things.

[1] https://rxdb.info/

About a year ago, I discovered a cool offline-first framework called RxDB. Initially, I thought that on the frontend side, this was exactly what I had been searching for over the past years. After tinkering around and even using it in production for some time, I realized that it wasn't well-suited for my intended use. RxDB was initially created as an RxJS layer for PouchDB with a server replication interface. Over time, other storage types besides PouchDB were introduced (e.g., IndexedDB, SQLite) and the replication interface became more sophisticated. The replication interface is really cool and exactly what I wanted. The biggest problem I have with RxDB is that it is so tightly coupled with RxJS. While RxJS is technically very powerful, it offers a dreadful developer experience. It's really hard to understand at first and integrating it into an existing codebase, which isn't using RxJS, is tedious.

Congrats to the team. Once I’ve tried https://rxdb.info/ and it wasn’t funny at all to do the remote replication (PG) and to deal with conflicts. I do need to check this out!

RxDB (Open Source but paid plugins)

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).

The DSL experience comes naturally to us as we have witnessed how well-designed language can greatly simplify programming tasks. We know it is challenging but not as difficult as many may feel. Therefore, we chose the schema-first design to create ZenStack toolkit on top of Prisma ORM that leverages code generation to significantly reduce the code developers need to write and make them move a lot faster.

Our products microservice is also straight forward just like how the auth has been. As previously plotted, we will be using different technologies on each service and we are using PostgreSQL as a database and prisma orm(Object Relational Mapper) for querying our DB. ORMs are used to translate between the data representations used by databases and those used in object-oriented programming, and in this service, we will be using one of the most common ones in the nodejs ecosystem, Prisma. It is the only fully type-safe ORM in the TypeScript ecosystem. The generated Prisma Client ensures typed query results even for partial queries and relations.