zapatos VS kysely

Requiring the user to define model classes for the "ORM" is a massive pain in large codebases and requiring the user to maintain these is just too much boilerplate. Seems extremely bloated compared to the simplicity of how the shortcuts are implemented in Zapatos or similar libraries where 90% of the code is compiled away for production.

Take a look at https://github.com/gajus/slonik and https://github.com/jawj/zapatos

I’m surprised to see no mention of tagged literals, a much more complex version of template literals. For users they may seem ~like a function call without parentheses. But they do quite a bit more.

Short version: they accept an array of raw substrings and a variadic set of arguments corresponding to the runtime values provided in template positions, each positional value corresponding following the raw string preceding it.

That raw array is more than what it seems, it also has a getter of raw string values for the template expressions. This is what String.raw (also not mentioned) uses to treat those arguments essentially the same way an untagged template literal would.

It’s an odd design/interface but it can be used to do some pretty cool stuff. For example, Zapatos[1], a type-safe SQL library for TypeScript.

My only complaints:

- I can’t think of a real reason for it to be variadic, and this makes authoring them a little more error prone. You should be able to expect one array of strings with a length N, and one array of (type checkable/inferrable) values with a length N-1.

2. Likewise I can’t think of a real reason for the raw values to be bolted onto a weird array subclass. It could just as easily have been an iterable third argument.

1: https://github.com/jawj/zapatos

Did you check https://github.com/koskimas/kysely ? It was great when I used it. It has great TS support.

That’s where Kysely comes to the rescue: Kysely is a type-safe and devX-friendly typescript SQL query builder. It was designed to work with PostgreSQL and MySQL, but it exposes a few classes that can let us write queries without being connected to an actual relational database.

prisma (mentioned in the article), zapatos, pgtyped and kysely are the most popular currently I think.

switch between a limited interface and a query builder (MikroORM, TypeORM). This feels like using two different libraries, switching between two different sets of limitations. Kysely is a nice query builder with good TS support, but MikroORM is using Knex instead so you're losing TS, and TypeORM has a custom query builder, less user-friendly than Knex.

I'd love to see Kysely as an option.

Kysely[1] and zapatos[2] are excellent solutions for type-safe typescript query builders. It’s hard to go back to the days of spending 20-30% of your time in the object mapping layer.

[1] https://github.com/koskimas/kysely

Querying the database (PostgreSQL) should not be ground breaking. Personally I like to have full type-safety so we can easily catch bugs during the development time without introducing any tests that are just testing the data type from our datastore to match the data type our API expects. I like to go database schema first, which means that we generate types from the database schema and work with those. Any change to the schema of the database is made with SQL migrations and after that, the typescript types are regenerated. Another approach is to use a code-first tool like TypeORM or Prisma. However in my experience such tools often produce not efficient SQL queries and are less easy to extend. In my projects I use library kysely (https://github.com/koskimas/kysely) with kysely-codegen (https://github.com/RobinBlomberg/kysely-codegen) to have a full type-safe SQL builder.