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Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

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Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#61

Post by anonzzzies »

arnorhs wrote: post #59

Nice, looks promising. How does this compare to drizzle? Context: We've had a lot of ORM frameworks come and go in node.js - sequelize, typeorm etc, but none of them have really caught on. Things have been changing a lot lately after typescript took over, so we've seen a bunch of ORMs take off that give you a really good typescript experience. So, the juggernaut in this space is of course prisma, which is super expre…

Hmm. I might be wrong as I haven't used Drizzle, just read the docs, but isn't Drizzle just like Prisma? That's really not the same as this. I find Prisma at least one of the most terrible things I ever worked with in my life; the rigidity (which I guess is the arrogance of the devs which they call opinionated; their right but he), the weird querying dsl, the terrible tooling. Just checked 'Drizzle queries' again and see it looks exactly like Prisma is it not? That's really not anything like this imho?

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#62

Post by [deleted] »

anonzzzies wrote: post #61
arnorhs wrote: post #59

Nice, looks promising. How does this compare to drizzle? Context: We've had a lot of ORM frameworks come and go in node.js - sequelize, typeorm etc, but none of them have really caught on. Things have been changing a lot lately after typescript took over, so we've seen a bunch of ORMs take off that give you a really good typescript experience. So, the juggernaut in this space is of course prisma, which is super expre…

Hmm. I might be wrong as I haven't used Drizzle, just read the docs, but isn't Drizzle just like Prisma? That's really not the same as this. I find Prisma at least one of the most terrible things I ever worked with in my life ; the rigidity (which I guess is the arrogance of the devs which they call opinionated; their right but he), the weird querying dsl, the terrible tooling. Just checked 'Drizzle queries' again an…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#63

Post by onion90 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #61
arnorhs wrote: post #59

Nice, looks promising. How does this compare to drizzle? Context: We've had a lot of ORM frameworks come and go in node.js - sequelize, typeorm etc, but none of them have really caught on. Things have been changing a lot lately after typescript took over, so we've seen a bunch of ORMs take off that give you a really good typescript experience. So, the juggernaut in this space is of course prisma, which is super expre…

Hmm. I might be wrong as I haven't used Drizzle, just read the docs, but isn't Drizzle just like Prisma? That's really not the same as this. I find Prisma at least one of the most terrible things I ever worked with in my life ; the rigidity (which I guess is the arrogance of the devs which they call opinionated; their right but he), the weird querying dsl, the terrible tooling. Just checked 'Drizzle queries' again an…

The "Drizzle Queries" section of the docs describes additional APIs for relations (referred to in the docs as db.query). There is also an API that looks/works much more like SQL (see db.select(), db.insert(), db.update()) with good types.

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#64

Post by mst »

tilyupo wrote: post #21
fourseventy wrote: post #8

I've come to the conclusion that ORMs are good for simple queries like User.find_by(email: "john@snow.com"), but once you get beyond that you are better off just writing sql.

I agree, classic ORMs usually don't play well with complex queries. I think Qustar is closer to a query builder than ORM tbh. You can compose arbitrary queries using it.

People have often said of https://p3rl.org/DBIx::Class that's it's more a Relational to Object Mapper than an Object to Relational Mapper.

We've (I was the original author, bias alert) always had a policy of "if you can't convince it to produce the exact same query that you'd've written by hand, that's either a bug or a missing feature."

Some of said features do still remain missing, because of course they do, but the attitude is hugely important nevertheless.

You're doing an awesome thing here, and ... I've been considering trying to write a better ROM for JS on and off for a while, and though I may still do so anyway, assuming my sieve-like brain doesn't forget about qustar first I think I should really talk to you about whether we can work together instead before I strike out on my own.

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#65

Post by mst »

tilyupo wrote: post #57
brap wrote: post #56

Pretty cool! The only thing I didn't like in the examples were things like .eq and .add, which are kind of a DSL, so it takes away from the "just plain JS" approach. But I assume it's because JS doesn't allow operator overloading?

Yep, I would love to use plain "==" and "+", but JS doesn't support it.

I've seen (and implemented myself) operator overloading based systems for query builder type things ... and the way such facilities work in every language I've seen/tried them in has had enough limitations that it wasn't really a great idea in the end anyway.

https://p3rl.org/DBIx::Perlish does it pretty nicely, but only because instead of using operator overloading the author lets the query code compile as a lambda and then pulls apart the perl5 VM opcodes and translates -those- into a query, which is ... awesome in its own way but not something you'd want to try and reproduce.

Interestingly, Scala actually turns 'x + y' into 'x.+(y)' and you could maybe get somewhere with that style.

For javascript, you'd probably need instead to provide a Babel transform and rely on the fact that like 90%+ of javascript projects are already 'compile to javascript' code except that the source is also sort of javascript.

My plan instead is to have an API much like yours (... or possibly just (ab)use yours, see my other comment ...) and then a format string based DSL for nicer querying.

... now that I think about it, making the DSL I have in mind work with qustar might be a good "dual implementations keep you honest" thing, but I have a lot of yaks to shave before that becomes relevant, so please nobody hold your breath.

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#66

Post by cies »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #47
arrty88 wrote: post #25

Very cool. Reminds me of linq to sql

Yes, as an efcore fan, I often wish that we had better ORM in my company's node projects. Sequelize seriously drives me insane

A jooq-like for TypeScript (as vanilla JS would kind of defy jooq's purpose) would be really nice.

I'm not sold on ORMs. They make the easy queries slightly easier, and have no solution more complex queries. Not worth the learning-curve (life times, caching, dirty state, associations, cascading, mapping, etc)

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#67

Post by chatmasta »

tilyupo wrote: post #57
brap wrote: post #56

Pretty cool! The only thing I didn't like in the examples were things like .eq and .add, which are kind of a DSL, so it takes away from the "just plain JS" approach. But I assume it's because JS doesn't allow operator overloading?

Yep, I would love to use plain "==" and "+", but JS doesn't support it.

You can achieve some hacky form of operator overloading by implementing the “well-known” Symbol.toPrimitive, and exploiting the fact that the addition operator coerces its operands to either a Number or String.

It won’t be perfect but maybe you can do something useful with it. Symbols in general are a really powerful tool that almost enable meta-programming in JS. I searched “Symbol” in your repository and didn’t see any results, so if you aren’t familiar with them, I recommend taking the time to read up on how you can use them.

See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

And this 2015 blog: https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/metaprogramming-in-es6-symbols...

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#69

Post by recursive »

pjerem wrote: post #10
EarthLaunch wrote: post #4

An intriguing idea! I like this approach for being an innovative interface to SQL. I wonder if it would reduce cognitive load when interfacing with the DB. I'm a game dev and often need to avoid situations where I'm using '.map' to iterate an entire array, for performance reasons. It would feel odd to use the concept, knowing it wasn't really iterating and/or was using an index. Is that how it works?

It’s exactly what Entity Framework does in dotnet. It allows you to query the database like it’s an enumerable. In fact, in EF, an IQueryable (which is the interface you use to query a SQL dataset) implements IEnumerable. So you can 100% manipulate your dataset like a normal array/list. Sure it comes with its own shenanigans but 90% of the time it’s easy to read and to manipulate.

Performing a query with EF is able to do stuff that can't be done with `IEnumerable`. So that a filter()/.Where() can actually generate a WHERE clause instead of looping over every record.

Re: Show HN: Node.js ORM to query SQL database through an array-like API

#70

Post by ARandomerDude »

efitz wrote: post #58

Now that we have about 15 years of ORMs, do they really make things easier? SQL is not a difficult language to learn, and views and stored procedures provide a stable interface that decouples the underlying table schema, allowing for migrations and refactoring of the database structure without having to rewrite a lot of code. ORMs seem to me to be mostly about syntactic sugar nowadays; I’m worried that the abstractio…

You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong. Here's another benefit to just using SQL: it's cross-language, cross-framework, cross-decade. So "select firstName from users where id=?;" works in 2024 with Go, JavaScript, etc., but it also worked in 2010 with Ruby and 1999 with PHP.

Every time you switch languages, or stay in the same language for 2 years, you have to learn another ORM. SQL is about as close as timeless gets in this business.

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