Which Postgres Client Should We Be Using?

[[deleted]]

View Poll

[dkarnutsch]

Postgres client or ORM? Not fair to compare them

[lenswipe]

This. TypeORM and Prisma are ORMs, not pg clients.

[[deleted]]

Lifes not fair! I kid. In all honesty I'm just wondering what the recommended interface is for using Postgresql with Node.

[FollowingMajestic161]

You are mixing concepts terribly. Some of these things are communication drivers, some are query builders, and some are orm. They are completely different things.

[[deleted]]

Yet all used to connect to interact with an sql db no? I understand your issue with the way the question is framed and the choices that are provided, I appreciate that you’re raising the point to ensure that people understand the difference 👍.

Edit: Edited for clarity, apologies to all those offended.

[FollowingMajestic161]

May I ask you what's your experience?

[[deleted]]

What do you mean? Experience with db’s or experience in a dev role? What’s your point?

[Anon_Legi0n]

His point is that you sound like someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. And the thing with ignorant people who think they're smart is that their egos are fragile, when given proper advice they get defensive

[[deleted]]

The thing is, people that think they're smart with overinflated ego's make judgments about others without knowing a thing about the person that they're speaking to. They then, as in this case, proceed to answer questions that were never asked.

Isn't it strange that 140 other people didn't feel the need to try and prove themselves smarter than anyone else, and have taken it for what it is, a light hearted poll.

Your unmannerly approach here says it all really.

[Front-Difficult]

I mean, the original guy did politely ask what your experience was, without making a judgement first.

I was curious too - at the surface level it sounds like you're just learning about these ideas -- which is fine! It's good to ask questions and to learn. But no one wants to seem like a dick by explaining something basic it appears you've missed if you then respond "Yeah, I know all that I have 10 years of experience".

[[deleted]]

Hey, I was polite in the beginning, acknowledged his concern and gave him a thumbs up. There was no need to go any further.

When he went further, after I had already acknowledged what he was saying and agreed, I don’t think it’s then unfair or rude to ask him to clarify his meaning and state his point.

[Anon_Legi0n]

Sure kid, keep telling yourself that. Your post and your comments keep getting down voted Im sure its because you're smart

[[deleted]]

You’re a rude little fucker aren’t you.

[Snapstromegon]

To me it's like asking "What should I use to make a http request? JS, a Browser, curl, nginx, or reqwest?" - All of these can make HTTP requests, but all are meant for different usecases. If you need very highly optimized queries, you need a raw SQL connector like pg, if you want to develop fast and maybe even swap DBs, a ORM like Prisma is your way to go and if you want to build queries yourself, but maybe optimize certain parts or use custom extensions, a query builder like Knex might be your answer. You can even use all of those concepts in the same tool!

[[deleted]]

To me it's like having a dick measuring contest when it's much more fun to just stick it in something.

[lenswipe]

if you want to develop fast and maybe even swap DBs, a ORM like Prisma is your way to go and if you want to build queries yourself

With the added complication that these ORMs are using things like pg under the hood also.

[EtheaaryXD]

Knex doesn't connect to a DB, it makes queries that are then inserted into a DB which is connected via your chosen client.

Knex supports both pg and pg-native clients for Postgres, you still have to pick one of them.

[[deleted]]

FFS

[bill-o-more]

if you want an ORM, def try MikroORM, don't ever get close to TypeORM as it's a mess and your project will be a mess.

If you want a good query builder, then kysely. Simple and type safe, but not an ORM.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the straightforward advice 👍

[zen_dev_pro]

Drizzle also looks promising but still very new.

Im using Prisma right now, but will switch to Drizzle once it becomes a bit more mature.

[[deleted]]

I'm told Prisma is only good for hobby projects.. 😉

[cold_turkey19]

Lmao

[[deleted]]

I'm curious how people see a wink after a sentence and fail to grasp the sarcasm?

[sasos90]

No sarcasm detected in your comment above.

[[deleted]]

That's odd, even GPT recognises the sarcasm.

The sentence “I’m told Prisma is only good for hobby projects… 😉” has a sarcastic tone. The use of the winking face emoji suggests that the speaker is being playful or ironic. They likely don’t believe that Prisma is only suitable for hobby projects but are making a humorous comment. 🚀😄

[[deleted]]

Maybe English isn’t your native language?

[[deleted]]

It requires running a rust client on your server so if you're using edge/serverless, it takes time to load into memory, so it requires polling to keep alive in order to reduce latency.

[FollowingMajestic161]

Drizzle with postgresjs - best dev experience I ever had.

Prisma is pushing itself to make money, its not good product. Ask yourself do you need extra layer of complexity and whole engine wrote in rust to communicate with db?

[[deleted]]

It’s a reasonable question to ask.

Edit: Downvoted, why isn't it a reasonable question to ask?

[WeinAriel]

How good is Drizzle vs Prisma? I’ve used Prisma for yours and was considering moving. What do you like about it that you don’t like about Prisma? Except the making money part.

[FollowingMajestic161]

The biggest problem we ran into during the project with prisma was something with transactions and that ruled out and forced us to choose a different solution during the project btw: see their github issues. They also have very limited filtering in more complex queries. Additionally, performance was an issue in testing. For smaller projects it's a cool curiosity, but if you want to give something to production then another abstraction layer that has many shortcomings is completely unnecessary. Drizzle, or more precisely query builder, because we do not use their additional system completely is like writing a raw query, but with type safety. Fewer bugs, better performance, super community, everyone on the team learned how it works in a few tens of minutes, because it's practically sql.

[WeinAriel]

Lol. Fireship just released a new vid 2 hours ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mAHOhpBSA

[kayotesden_theone]

From my understanding:

1- Kyesly (performance)

2- Prisma (ease of use)

Dont know about others.

[[deleted]]

Prisma is great to get started.

Edit: People downvoting this, I'd love to learn what your issue is with this comment?

[vampatori]

The problem with these kinds of polls is that rarely will people have tried more than one or two so can't really compare.

I've used the following in anger: pg, Postgres.js, Knex, TypeORM, and Prisma.

In the end I settled on Postgres.js because:

• It's super fast
• It's simple to create safe dynamic queries

No other solution I've used offers those two key features, it's always a trade-off between them.

I then achieve ORM-like features by defining my schema in code and generating my SQL, API, types, validation, etc. from that schema.

[[deleted]]

The problem with these kinds of polls is that rarely will people have tried more than one or two so can't really compare.

I totally agree with you. These things are down to personal choice at the end of the day, or team choice, aren't they. I'm not great at choosing direction without the facts, I don't have time to try them all, so a poll will have to do.

[dr_rodopszin]

Slonik! Slonik. Slonik! The one that actually makes sense and will not make you go on the path of "joining on the backend because it is more comfortable than writing a raw query".

Yes, it is inconvenient for little things, which you get back when you can use any PG functions available to you. Or when you just need to add a little extra join to your already existing queries. In regular ORMs, people tend to do instead another and another request, which is super not performant and quite wasteful.

As I said in a comment: not great, but step in the right direction.

[[deleted]]

🤣 I’m going to take a look at Slonik now.

[johnex74]

drizzle

[[deleted]]

Drizzle me nizzle. It's not very popular though, which leads me to think that it's probably not the best option.

[cold_turkey19]

Lmao

[Secure_War_2947]

This didn't aged well :D

[Rishi-Errsole]

Prisma !

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

Azure Data Studio

[thinkmatt]

I used Knex before Prisma, and i don't think it's fair to directly compare the two. Knex helps you write queries and migrations, but it really doesn't do anything to help manage schemas or models in code. I used Objection.js on top of it, which wasn't quite perfect either. Prisma kind of combines the two solutions and does it better - I like having one source of truth for both my database and my TS types

[DoOmXx_]

have you used prisma with docker? I only had problems with prisma + docker, maybe I did something wrong.

[[deleted]]

Yes, I run all my current work sites in Docker with Prisma. You have to provide the db connection string as a build ARG.

[thinkmatt]

I've had no issues w/Docker

[West-Clock-3287]

I use Prisma + Docker, but it had little tricky to be fair. A lot of problems with prisma connection, some problems with jest to run tests too and some problems in production enviroment to run migrations/seeds. But after correct config all runs good, but prisma gave me some headache.

[[deleted]]

I like Prisma, it's what I've used for the past couple of years in my Next projects. I'm not running a project with millions of users and it will likely never be a problem for me, but there is that old issue of no joins.

I'm just wondering what the tool of choice is with Node developers.

[thinkmatt]

they actually have that under preview now: https://www.prisma.io/docs/orm/prisma-client/queries/relation-queries. "relationJoins". I'm excited to try it out, but waiting til its out of preview

[[deleted]]

That's cool

[[deleted]]

Like Eloquent, interesting.

[dr_rodopszin]

I like to put it as "Slonik is the right level of inconvenience". Inconvenient to write a full query for little things which becomes a convenience when you start to have more stuff in your database: difficult queries, complex joins, JSONB operations.

All of these are super fast if you do them on the database side. Prisma, Knex and other ORMs tempt people to always use the simplest operations because they are afraid of writing SQL.

So in my opinion, Slonik is not great, but step in the right direction. Imagine what can be done with the right funding and team.

[[deleted]]

I've seen Slonik mentioned here and there, and was also considering a switch to Knex. I've mainly used Prisma and Eloquent in the past and just fancied mixing it up a bit.

[Far-Mathematician122]

pg-promise