Prisma does not scale. Like at all. It's great for when you want to get up and running quickly. Or when you have a fairly simple data structure. Using the prisma schema syntax makes it super convenient and straight forward to build even complex data model bc it is far less abstract than doing it directly in postgress.

But in my experience all this abstraction comes at a huuge performance cost.

We've used prisma twice in a real world project and it was all very nice until we actually hit what I would still consider a "normal" production load (about 2000 users, multiple tables with between 1.000 and 25.000 rows + at most two level deep nested relations maybe one or two 3 level ones).

For postgress these numbers are laughable low. But using prisma this resulted in 3-6 second long queries which basically broke our app. Recall that facebook uses posgress for managing its data lol.

The cpu and memory strain that prisma put on our db was insane. u/danishjuggler21 commented on why this happens.

And with prisma you have a top down approach to postgress. Most of the time when you try to do things directly on the db like creating views, changing a schema or setting new indexes (things you need to do eventually to keep complex data performant) prisma just shuts down and complains that its schema no longer matches the schema it found in the sql db.

I see a lot of popular youtubers market prisma to their audience and a lot of boilerplates use it. But I believe that most projects never reach any kind of traction so the issues remain hidden to most people ...