Slonik Alternatives

slonik reviews and mentions

• Parrot – type-safe SQL in Gleam
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Oct 2025

  There's two different approaches to solving sql composability issues:

  1. Compiles-to-SQL domain specific languages. This category spans from ORM DSLs embedded in another programming language, like Ruby/Rail's ActiveRecord/AREL or Django's ORM; to stand-alone text-based languages like PRQL Pipelined Relational Query Language" (https://prql-lang.org) that a compiler program converts to SQL text or SQL files. The downside to the DSL option is that it requires practitioners be fluent in both the SQL query they want, and in the DLS language - to know how to obtain the SQL query in the DSL.

  2. Query fragment literals in the caller programming language, like sql`name = ${name}` in TypeScript (eg https://github.com/gajus/slonik). These are usually thin abstraction over concatenating a `{ queryText: string[], queryArgs: T[] }` structure. The author only needs to be fluent in SQL, and in the caller language, but do less to save you from the expressive limitations of SQL itself.

  I've found query fragment composition to be the sweet spot. Easy SQL queries remain trivial to express and understand, since it's Just SQL:

      sql`SELECT * FROM block WHERE id = ${args.id}`

• ArkType: Ergonomic TS validator 100x faster than Zod
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2025
• Sqlc: Compile SQL to type-safe code
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2024

  Didn’t use myself, but AFAIK slonik library is doing what you’ve described: https://github.com/gajus/slonik

• Show HN: TypeScript SQL Query API Engine for Postgres
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2024

  Some time ago I started working on this query API engine, a sort of layer on top of slonik[1], to abstract the most tedious parts of using straight SQL (dynamic filtering, paginating etc).

  The idea was to make it easy to create typesafe querying APIs, similar to ORMs I was using at the time, but using pure SQL. I was also inspired by hasura's GraphQL API engine, but wanted to build something simpler for tRPC APIs, thus the name.

  I've also built a small playground where you can see the raw SQL queries that are created when you run the API [2]

  It's a proof of concept that I've used to build APIs with a lot of dynamic filters and complex sub-queries, I'd love to know your thoughts on it!

  [1]: https://github.com/gajus/slonik

  [2]: https://sql-api-playground.netlify.app/

• Sneakiest development trap: making easy easier...
  1 project | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024

  And sometimes invest instead in learning a technology rather than hide it: for example slonik encourages you to write normal SQL queries by making SQL templating easier and safer. In turn, your IDE would be able to understand those queries and give you support based on the database schemas you actually have.

• Drizzle is just as unready for prime-time as Prisma, what else is there?
  12 projects | /r/reactjs | 6 Dec 2023

  I'd push you to consider using postgres, slonik or similar for database queries. With these libraries, you just write SQL, but they perform input sanitization for you. So you can safely write:

• Slonik: PostgreSQL client for Node.js with runtime validation
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2023
• PostgresJs: The Fastest full featured PostgreSQL client for Node.js and Deno
  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2023

  You can already use postgres with Slonik.

  https://github.com/gajus/slonik#user-content-slonik-how-are-...

  It is not going to be the default because it is way slower.

  https://github.com/gajus/slonik/actions/runs/6616647651

  Test node_version:18 test_only:postgres-integration is taking 3 minutes.

  Test node_version:18 test_only:pg-integration is taking 38 seconds.

• Integrating Slonik with Express.js
  2 projects | dev.to | 30 Sep 2023

  For those uninitiated, Slonik is a battle-tested SQL query building and execution library for Node.js. Its primary goal is to allow you to write and compose SQL queries in a safe and convenient way. Now, let's see how it pairs with Express.js.

• Which Postgres client are you using?
  1 project | /r/node | 29 Sep 2023

  I am the maintainer of Slonik and I am trying to understand what portion of this sub-users are using Slonik vs other libraries, and if they are using anything else – what are their reasons for it.

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  www.saashub.com | 6 Jun 2026

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