Show HN: Zapatos, a Postgres Library for TypeScript

:) Happy that you noticed the thought that went into presenting the examples.

I hadn't come across those other libraries.

On Prisma, I think I agree with your assessment. A key thing that this and Prisma have in common is interrogating your DB to generate types. Zapatos is (almost) wholly limited to generating types, while it seems Prisma generates a bunch of code too.

Prisma seems somewhat more like an ordinary ORM. It introduces more of its own terminology and abstractions, has its own ways of inserting into and querying related tables, and so on. At a glance, it looks nicely thought out. It has plans to become a SaaS of some sort.

Mammoth, on the other hand, looks like it tries to solve a very similar problem to Zapatos, and gets there by providing a query builder. You define all your tables manually in code, and then write SQL through the medium of TypeScript.

Fair point!

TypeORM is very much a traditional ORM. You define your model classes, and the relationships between them, in code, and TypeORM takes charge of creating and modifying your tables. Then you use the model classes to query the database, without really knowing what SQL is going to be issued. TypeORM is complicated: there are lots of new abstractions to learn, and you’re a long way from the raw SQL.

Zapatos aims at a very much reduced level of abstraction: it’s really just a much more ergonomic, and fully typed, way to run SQL. I created it mainly out of frustration with TypeORM, after converting an existing code base from CoffeeScript to TypeScript and from Sequelize to TypeORM.

My recollection is that TypeORM did something really dumb and unexpected, like deciding to catch a unique index violation and silently replace the offending record, and that this was what finally prompted me to decide to replace it with something homegrown. I also found using transactions with TypeORM clumsy and painful.