Comment by nikolasburk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikolasburk | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like current database tools don't really cut it! From my own experience, working with databases in Node.js and TypeScript has always been a painful experience – sometimes more, sometimes less, but it was never smooth or enjoyable!

With Prisma, we're setting out to build database tools that make developers more _confident_ and _productive_ [1] in their database workflows!

We're focusing on type-safety, intuitive data modeling, easy working with relations and overall simpler ways for achieving common tasks with your database.

We also wrote at length about what we believe the shortcomings are with databases tools in our documentation [2], would love to hear your feedback about our thoughts here!

[1] https://www.prisma.io/blog/announcing-prisma-2-n0v98rzc8br1/

[2] https://www.prisma.io/docs/understand-prisma/why-prisma

> working with databases in Node.js and TypeScript has always been a painful experience

Even after reading your (three) paragraphs from the article on why raw SQL and drivers are bad, I'm far from sold.

1. Establish connection 2. Execute SQL 3. Manipulate results 4. More SQL/Commit/close

IME a lot of the struggle comes from not understanding how 1. or 2. work and trying to do all the heavy lifting in 3. The amount of times I've refactored dozens of lines of code into <10, with huge performance and readability gains by simply using SQL's potential...

Best of luck with the sales.

On the other hand, working at a large company I saw a many-line SQL query that had been run monthly for a long while, looked at and edited by quite a few people, which down in the middle of it was comparing (for equality) a city id and a probability.

There is absolutely room for improved tooling. I have no idea whether Prisma is it.

Well better tools wouldn't have helped that, since most of the them just expose the underlying low-level DB types. Until databases support a proper type-system that doesn't just describe memory layout that kind of bug will always be an issue.

"A proper type-system that doesn't just describe memory layout" is one kind of better tool, whether built into the database or separate.

I used MongoDB + Mongoose in TypeScript and the experience was ok. Just declare a Schema and it works, you get typings and everything. I think the problem was not the DB itself (MongoDB) but the tooling around it.

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