ScalikeJDBC VS µTest

You can also try http://scalikejdbc.org which is my personal favorite.

Maybe not what you're looking for but ScalikeJDBC is published for Scala 3 since version 4.0.0.

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.

Let's clarify some points for folks not so familiar with Scala.

> * Scala minor version are binary incompatible, so maintaining Scala projects is a big pain. Upgrading Spark from Scala 2.11 to Scala 2.12 was a massive undertaking for example.

Scala just chose a strange naming scheme. Other languages would have just increased their major version instead. The scala minor version is increased every few years and not every month or so.

> * Scala has tons of language features and lets people do crazy things in the code.

Actually, that's not true. Or rather: compared to what language?

Scala has surprisingly few language features, but the ones it has are very flexible and powerful. Take Kotlin for example. It has method extensions as a dedicated feature. Scala just has implicits which can be used for method extension.

> * Scalatest is stil used by most projects and is annoying to use, as described here: https://github.com/lihaoyi/utest#why-utest. The overuse of DSLs in Scala is really annoying.

I agree with the overuse of DSLs. Luckily that got much better, but older libraries like scalatest still suffer from that.

> * Li's libs (os-lib, upickle, utest) have clean public interfaces, but most Scala ecosystem libs are hard to use, see the JSON alternatives for examples

I think that just comes from using the library in a non-idiomatic way. In most applications, you will need to use the whole json anyways, and then you use (or can use) circe like that:

    {