xo VS sqlc

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I see that it works best with Postgresql. The other commenter mentioned https://github.com/xo/xo for MySql which might work well.

Thanks for your comment and question @onionisfruit. Top-notch handle too!

>> What are your plans for models and persistence?

I haven't worked out all the details, but it's going to be some blend of https://github.com/xo/xo and https://sqlc.dev/.

Design goals:

1. High-level, type-safe "ORM" that's generated from your database schema.

Something like that? https://github.com/xo/xo

I'm a big fan of the database first code generator approach to talking to an SQL database, so much so that I wrote pggen[1] (not to be confused with pggen[2], as far as I can tell a sqlc fork, which I just recently learned about).

I'm a really big partisan of this approach, but I think I'd like to play the devil's advocate here and lay out some of the weaknesses of both a database first approach in general and sqlc in particular.

All database first approaches struggle with SQL metaprogramming when compared with a query builder library or an ORM. For the most part, this isn't an issue. Just writing SQL and using parameters correctly can get you very far, but there are a few times when you really need it. In particular, faceted search and pagination are both most naturally expressed via runtime metaprogramming of the SQL queries that you want to execute.

Another drawback is poor support from the database for this kind of approach. I only really know how postgres does here, and I'm not sure how well other databases expose their queries. When writing one of these tools you have to resort to tricks like creating temporary views in order infer the argument and return types of a query. This is mostly opaque to the user, but results in weird stuff bubbling up to the API like the tool not being able to infer nullability of arguments and return values well and not being able to support stuff like RETURNING in statements. sqlc is pretty brilliant because it works around this by reimplementing the whole parser and type checker for postgres in go, which is awesome, but also a lot of work to maintain and potentially subtlety wrong.

A minor drawback is that you have to retrain your users to write `x = ANY($1)` instead of `x IN ?`. Most ORMs and query builders seem to lean on their metaprogramming abilities to auto-convert array arguments in the host language into tuples. This is terrible and makes it really annoying when you want to actually pass an array into a query with an ORM/query builder, but it's the convention that everyone is used to.

There are some other issues that most of these tools seem to get wrong, but are not impossible in principle to deal with for a database first code generator. The biggest one is correct handling of migrations. Most of these tools, sqlc included, spit out the straight line "obvious" go code that most people would write to scan some data out of a db. They make a struct, then pass each of the field into Scan by reference to get filled in. This works great until you have a query like `SELECT * FROM foos WHERE field = $1` and then run `ALTER TABLE foos ADD COLUMN new_field text`. Now the deployed server is broken and you need to redeploy really fast as soon as you've run migrations. opendoor/pggen handles this, but I'm not aware of other database first code generators that do (though I could definitely have missed one).

Also the article is missing a few more tools in this space. https://github.com/xo/xo. https://github.com/gnormal/gnorm.

[1]: https://github.com/opendoor/pggen

I've used https://github.com/xo/xo, extended it with some custom functions for templating, extended the templates themselves, and can now generate CRUD for anything in the database, functions for common select queries based on the indices that exist in the database, field filtering and scanning, updates for subsets of fields including some atomic operations, etc. The sky is the limit honestly. It has allowed me to start with something approximating a statically generated ORM and extend it with any features I want as time goes on. I also write .extra.go files along side the generated .xo.go files to extend the structs that are generated with custom logic and methods to convert data into response formats.

I like the approach of starting with the database schema and generating code to reflect that. I define my schema in sql files and handle database migrations using https://github.com/golang-migrate/migrate.

If you take this approach, you can mostly avoid exposing details about the SQL driver being used, and since the driver is mostly used by a few templates, swapping drivers doesn't take much effort.

Here is an example of the MySQL Django tables generated by GORM https://github.com/xo/xo/tree/master/examples/django/mysql

For this matter I chose sqlc which offers a good amount of features like support for different dbs and db drivers. Regarding db migrations, I prefer to run them isolated from the code. There are countless tools to manage migrations but recently I've been sticking with go-migrate which also provides a go library in case I want to integrate the migrations into the code.

The next step would be https://sqlc.dev/ for static analysis of your SQL queries and Go-type matching

Welcome to the very first post in go get it, our series on excellent Go packages and tools that deserve a spotlight. First out of the gate is a tool we're using extensively: sqlc.

We then use SQLC to generate type safe Go code to read and write to our database, taking our custom ID types and passing them through all the layers to the database without losing our type safety. We'll talk about how we use SQLC and other code generation in a future blog post to give us type safety into and out of the database. I'll leave you with a little sneak peek of a generated helper:

If you don’t mind the codegen being written in Go, it does look like these folks also want to do the same thing for TypeScript.

https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc/issues/296

Given the success of packaging other Go and Rust tools into npm, like esbuild, I suspect it’s probably actually not too bad of an idea.

Since it has a decent amount of stars, I suspect that a lot of people know it already, but I came across a cool tool through a tutorial: https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc

Thanks for your comment and question @onionisfruit. Top-notch handle too!

>> What are your plans for models and persistence?

I haven't worked out all the details, but it's going to be some blend of https://github.com/xo/xo and https://sqlc.dev/.

Design goals:

1. High-level, type-safe "ORM" that's generated from your database schema.

Have you seen https://sqlc.dev?