Prisma – ORM for Node.js and TypeScript

if you define yourself as a developer do yourself a favour and learn SQL. It's probably much easier than whatever programming language you use and will avoid you many headaches.

I think its unfortunate that Prisma is only server-side due to its Rust-based native DB module.

I think we can achieve a huge simplification in the industry if we develop a universal state-management solution that runs in the frontend and backend.

Without a consistent model, we are forced to write so much additional code to manage caching, optimistic UI updates, and offline capabilities.

Current RDBMS' are not ideal (most data is better represented as a graph), but because the relational model is so widely used in the backend, they are a good candidate for a universal data store on frontend and backend. And it is possible to represent graph-like structures in RDBMS' too, but it makes SQL querying very unfriendly.

GraphQL is an ideal language for declaratively specifying what data you need for the UI layer. If you doubt this, play around with the [Github GraphQL API][1]. It's an incredible experience to be able to explore and pluck exactly what you need. SQL and REST don't come close to this experience.

But GraphQL is essentially providing us a nicer way to write SQL compared to using JOINs, and to output it in a nested format for convenient rendering with nice typing. But it lacks a huge amount of flexibility.

So we should keep GraphQL as our API, but we should implement it client-side against a data model similar to what we use in our cloud db: SQL, and then do real-time syncing or use it as the model for our server-cache.

An added benefit is we don't have to worry anymore about what is local-state and what is server-persisted, or worry about choosing a good state management solution client-side.

The necessary pieces to make this happen don't exist at the moment, but I would have liked to use Prisma as the DB API for in-browser SQLite in the beginning.

I think there is then the opportunity to go full-stack and offer developers a client-side GraphQL library that talks to an in-browser SQL DB and to end the constant turnover in state-management libraries. I think every frontend developer is overwhelmed at this point by the proliferation of these libraries, and the simplicity they go seeking in things like "just use React.Context api", don't offer them what they will eventually need which is optimistic UI updates, offline modes, real-time collaboration, local-first experiences, etc.

I think we are all still in search of the right state management solution and it would be cool if Prisma did it!

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer

As soon as you need a lot of complex data all displayed in one place plus high performance, you're gonna find you need a list, not a hierarchy. You need to be able to treat the data coming in like a stream, not to traverse anything. Read the row, maybe do some state-machine stuff to decide how to treat it, then drop all that on the floor and move to the next row.

This is more-true the less efficient the language is that you're using. I see people screw this up when writing e.g. dashboards that source their data from SQL, while leaning on an ORM, all the time, and it always kills performance (talking tens of seconds to minutes for things that should take a single-digit count of seconds, at worst).

What's good at turning complex relational data into a list, and fast? Yep, SQL.

I wish Prisma had built-in Opentelemetry support for tracing and metrics.

They have a whole blog article about why monitoring is important but don't seem come with it: https://www.prisma.io/blog/monitoring-best-practices-monitor...

> It took me all of 1 hour to learn how to use prisma. It’s not as hard as you make it seem.

That's because the ORM cannot do a lot. Unless you're doing extremely simple SQL queries it will not handle what you want it to do. Now what? Drop into RAW sql and lose all type safety and you are on your own.

No thanks, I started using Prisma for https://listifi.app and switched it over to knex.js because the second I hit a query that Prisma couldn't handle I was on my own. Knex on the other hand could handle everything because it's a simple query builder.