ScalikeJDBC VS Quill

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.

https://github.com/zio/zio-quill

This library does exactly what you prescribe. Pretty sure under the hood it's using macros with string templates

But I can connect to Postgress with something like Quill and run sophisticated queries to fetch data. Which then got me thinking, what is the difference between using Spark to connect to the database and using something like Quill or your normal pure JDBC driver?

Just as an example, say you are using quill ( https://getquill.io/ ) to query your database.

I think Quill is the closest to your request: https://github.com/zio/zio-quill

If this still looks like too much hassle, you can always go a bit higher-level and use something like Quill, which is also a powerful approach that uses a different, more ORM-like style.

I'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html) and in the backend with AWS lambdas.

The ecosystem is currently in the process of porting all the libraries to Scala 3. So if you're new to Scala, I'd recommend to start with Scala 2, which is rock-solid and already very powerful.

I never worked with SQLAlchemy. But on the scala database side, popular libraries are Doobie (https://tpolecat.github.io/doobie) and Quill (https://getquill.io). Keep in mind that these are for Scala on the JVM. On the ScalaJS side I'm using the javascript library pg. But I'd like to try if it works well with Prisma soon.

The nice thing about ScalaJS is, that you can use Javascript libraries. And if there are typescript facades, then you can transpile these to Scala and use them in a type safe way (https://scalablytyped.org).

I know that libraries like Scodec and shapeless were rewritten practically from scratch for Scala 3, taking advantage of the next syntax and internals, as well as protoquill - a Scala 3 implementation of Quill.

Akka HTTP, Cats, Quill, ninny, Monix Observable, mill.