zapatos VS MikroORM

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

In my usual NodeJS tech stack, which includes GraphQL, NestJS, SQL (predominantly PostgreSQL with MikroORM), I encountered these limitations. To overcome them, I've developed a new stack utilizing Rust, which still offers some ease of development:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/mikro-orm - 44 issues

Mikro-ORM is a TypeScript ORM that focuses on simplicity and efficiency. It supports various SQL databases and MongoDB. Mikro-ORM is known for its simplicity and developer-friendly APIs. It provides a concise syntax for defining data models and relationships, making it easy to use.

I found MikroORM [0] to be quite reasonable if you're in the TS ecosystem already. It was also easy to do custom, raw queries, and really just felt like it wasn't in the way.

[0] https://mikro-orm.io/

It also does code generation into its own module, so good luck with hoisting in a monorepo where you want multiple independent prisma schemas. MikroORM[1] is a much better alternative to Prisma in my opinion but any ORM carries some form of baggage.

[1] https://mikro-orm.io/

More about v6 development can be found here.

I recommend looking at https://mikro-orm.io/