ScalikeJDBC VS Slick

Compare ScalikeJDBC vs Slick and see what are their differences.

ScalikeJDBC

A tidy SQL-based DB access library for Scala developers. This library naturally wraps JDBC APIs and provides you easy-to-use APIs. (by scalikejdbc)

Slick

Slick (Scala Language Integrated Connection Kit) is a modern database query and access library for Scala (by slick)
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ScalikeJDBC Slick
4 17
1,254 2,638
0.2% 0.3%
8.9 8.6
1 day ago 9 days ago
Scala Scala
Apache License 2.0 BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ScalikeJDBC

Posts with mentions or reviews of ScalikeJDBC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-02-24.
  • Query DSL in Scala 3
    2 projects | /r/scala | 24 Feb 2021
  • From First Principles: Why Scala?
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2021
    I have had poor experiences with "fancy" SQL libraries in multiple languages when I go past basic operations. This includes Slick and Quill in Scala.

    I don't remember what the problems were with Slick that leave such a bad feeling when I hear its name -- that was 5 years ago -- but I had problems with Quill just last year. I was trying to use it to generate an efficient "in" query against a two column composite primary key, and nothing seemed to work. Since it uses macro magic, one of my attempts triggered an internal compiler error instead of normal compiler feedback.

    I ended up dropping Quill for ScalikeJDBC:

    http://scalikejdbc.org/

    It seems to be less popular/active than other libraries, but it is dead simple to use, even for developers new to Scala. I write exactly the SQL I want just like I would in psql. There is little-to-no magic [1]. I think that the only slightly magical feature I use is ensure that variable interpolation into SQL ("SQLInterpolation") prevents injection attacks.

    [1] It actually has capabilities to automatically map tables/columns into different structures and generate code for you, but my team doesn't use any of that. We just write SQL.

Slick

Posts with mentions or reviews of Slick. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-12.
  • How many people/companies are fully on Scala 3?
    4 projects | /r/scala | 12 Jul 2023
  • First Slick prerelease for Scala 3!
    2 projects | /r/scala | 9 Jul 2023
    Made a PR on slick to document this https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2760 (workaround is quite easy, you can just define def tupled = (apply _).tupled in the companion object of the case class and it will also compile for all Scala versions).
    2 projects | /r/scala | 9 Jul 2023
  • Sketch of a Post-ORM
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jun 2023
    The Scala ecosystem has a few ways to do composable type-safe query building, e.g. Slick[0] or more recently Quill[1]. . I believe both also have ways to do compile-time string interpolation (e.g. sql"""select * from users where id = ${user.id}""") which generate prepared statements (I know Slick does prepared statements. Quill has similar macros but I haven't looked into how safe they are to use).

    [0] https://scala-slick.org/

  • Database abstraction library which allows a clean domain model
    2 projects | /r/scala | 20 Jan 2023
    With all this in mind, I landed at the first candidate: slick from https://scala-slick.org/ that you all probably know.
  • Scala 3 migration: 7 benefits that outweigh the risks
    2 projects | /r/scala | 3 Nov 2022
    I think Slick's current priority is also getting in Scala 3 support: https://github.com/slick/slick/issues/2177
  • Slick 3.4.x is here!
    3 projects | /r/scala | 18 Sep 2022
    Future releases might not be announced here. To get notified, go to https://github.com/slick/slick, click the Watch dropdown button at the top, select Custom, check Releases, and click Apply.
  • Is there any good resource for learning Slick (3.x)?
    2 projects | /r/scala | 2 Sep 2022
    https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/2097 now I use slightly lower version of slick so this might be an upgrade that resolves (I do recall using it in 21 and it was still buggy and I filed a ticket, which I cannot find at the moment), but given a complex enough query (we have one in PROD which has tons of flexibility in terms of filters that can be passed in) but it also makes for complex code.
  • Slick 3.4.0 is imminent
    2 projects | /r/scala | 16 Aug 2022
    I started writing a reply but then I realized it would be long and depends on exactly what you mean, so maybe it's better to post the question in https://github.com/slick/slick/discussions/categories/questions?
    2 projects | /r/scala | 16 Aug 2022
    You can see the draft release notes here and the upgrade guide at https://scala-slick.org/doc/prerelease/upgrade.html#upgrade-from-3-3-x-to-3-4-0. The latest docs are at https://scala-slick.org/doc/prerelease/index.html.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ScalikeJDBC and Slick you can also consider the following projects:

doobie - Functional JDBC layer for Scala.

Quill - Compile-time Language Integrated Queries for Scala

Squeryl - A Scala DSL for talking with databases with minimum verbosity and maximum type safety

Clickhouse-scala-client - Clickhouse Scala Client with Reactive Streams support

Anorm - The Anorm database library

Sorm - A functional boilerplate-free Scala ORM

cats-effect - The pure asynchronous runtime for Scala

Phantom - Schema safe, type-safe, reactive Scala driver for Cassandra/Datastax Enterprise