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To be fair, Sequelize makes itself look like a joke. I normally wouldn't call out an individual library to shit on, because I understand that a lot of work has gone into it.

But I used it for years and it was always buggy. Sometimes options wouldn't work correctly because the authors liked to do that clever JavaScript thing where they write `foo = optional_thing || default_value` even for BOOLEAN options. I always had issues with it not being able to truncate/drop tables correctly that had foreign keys (it didn't attempt to order them intelligently), some of the options weren't compatible with each other even though they were orthogonal (I'm thinking about the snake_casing options and the created_at/updated_at column features), etc, etc.

It just... didn't actually work. Over many versions. I think I used it from late 3.x somewhere through 5.x.

Maybe it's awesome now, but I doubt it.

No it's not. Even if they fixed all the bugs which I doubt the API design is bad.

> I normally wouldn't call out an individual library to shit on, because I understand that a lot of work has gone into it.

I don't think I've ever called out on a library, or not felt truly thankful that it was there to help me. But Sequelize... man...

When I first got into Node, and got Sequelize, after working for years with .NET, Entity Framework, NHibernate and the likes, it just felt like horrible-everything. I've forced myself to use it in some projects, because node is cheap, and I kept thinking that I'm missing something. Some brilliance behind the questionable... everything. No. I can't even bring myself to think about that design mess. Sorry for the rant, Sequelize makes me feel insecure, and little, in the chaos of the Universe.

Same. Honestly, I only have not-nice things to say about Node, JavaScript, and its ecosystem, so I should probably just shut up.

But I was like you- I picked up Node because we had an existing project in it. It only used libraries that had the most "stars" or whatever on NPM and they were all pretty deficient (and some were shockingly slow). But none were so frustrating as Sequelize.

I only have not-nice things to say about Node, JavaScript, and its ecosystem,

The NPM ecosystem can be frustrating and annoying sometimes but today nodejs is a solid server runtime.

Node-the-software-project is a feat of engineering.

But the API, the client language, the ecosystem, and even the idea are bad, IMO.

Bad API example: Tell me how to deal with time zones in Node without pulling in a big third party library. Answer: You can't. So, a "scalable" backend platform can't handle datetimes from different time zones? Neat!

"Well, that's JavaScript's fault" you say. Node certainly has (a few) APIs that don't apply to the frontend, so why not add more of the important ones for backend work?

Or, maybe JavaScript really just doesn't belong on the backend at all...

Not to mention that it's single-threaded, so the answer to scaling up better is to just run more instances. -_-

See? I should've stayed quiet. ;)

> Not to mention that it's single-threaded, so the answer to scaling up better is to just run more instances.

Yeah, this sucks. It's impossible to do any actual processing in javascript since functions that don't return immediately will clog the event loop. Why can't we have javascript code that runs asynchronously and reports completion and results as events? Even browsers seem to have this now. I tracked issue #2133 on GitHub for a long time and nothing materialized.

Not sure if Node.js still lacks this feature. If so then it means Node.js is nothing but an I/O scripting platform. You get events and you make the system copy data from some source to some destination in response. Any sort of actual processing means latency becomes unacceptably high.

Node has worker threads, which are basically the equivalent of Web Workers from browsers, with similar message based API

Wow really? Since when/what version? I have to see it. How did they solve the serialization issue? If I remember correctly that was necessary to pass objects between threads.

I think they became stable in v12. I'm actually not sure about the internal implementation, but from user's point of view you can pass almost [1] any value via a message and you will get a copy on the other side. You can even share memory between threads with SharedArrayBuffer.

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html#worker_threads_po...

You haven't mentioned the best query builder I've ever used - Elixir's Ecto. I encourage to give both Elixir and Ecto a try as they're worth learning.

Prisma 2 is a delight to use. Gave it a try after typeorm-model-generator’s author suggested using something else than TypeORM. Prisma blows other JS/TS ORM libraries out of the water. It integrates so well with VS Code

> GraphQL N+1 issues are a thing of the past.

Huh, care to explain this one? I’m using Prisma with Apollo Server without doing anything fancy in my resolvers. I just assumed I’m getting N+1 issues but didn’t bother to optimize yet.

in short the separate engine process allows them to combine every findX call you make during one tick of the event loop into a single SQL query, following the dataloader pattern, so you don’t have to implement it yourself. i’m sure @nikolasburk can shed some more light if you’re interested.

I have a feeling that does not work at all in non-trivial scenarios, e.g. if both composite keys and date range matching are required to resolve a reference.

Could you test this and get back to us with the results?

There are pretty extensive docs on how Prisma optimises n+1 queries: https://www.prisma.io/docs/guides/performance-and-optimizati...

The examples are still for a trivial case of joining one thing to many things. What about joining one thing to many things that join to many things that join to one thing that joins to many things that join to many things that join to many things?

No need to test really - indeed more complicated cases are not covered by this yet. But happy to look at any Github issues with reproduction of cases that are not working, but could or should work to make your life better.

Very interesting, thank you. Is there a way for me to monitor what Prisma is doing in my use case?

using `new PrismaClient({ log: ["query"] });` it'll log all the actual sql queries it's running, so you'll be able to see if queries are being combined

Awesome, thanks!

Turns out Prisma wasn’t optimizing my queries, I think it has to do with me not using the sub query API and instead querying tables seperately (e.g posts.findMany({ where: { owner: user } }))

Pleeeeeease open an issue if you have a simple reproduction for this. That will make sure we will make sure this _does_ work (sooner or later, not committing to a timeline here on HN of course :p).

If it's optimizing with figuring the calls in a single tick out, one can probably still optimize further by using db specific features, like postgres supports json_agg which let's you not only break n+1 in a way, but also prevents cartesian product explosion with joins

For the interested, here's an article that explains how the dataloader manages to pull this off https://www.mikealche.com/software-development/advanced-prom...

This isn't true. Prisma currently only supports batching of findUnique queries: https://www.prisma.io/docs/guides/performance-and-optimizati...

There's an issue open for findMany as well, but it hasn't moved in over a year: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/1477

Is 933 open issues a warning sign? Seems excessive.

Having used in the past both Django and Rails ORMs, I totally agree with this. Prisma is awesome, it's been the best experience I've ever had so far with SQL databases.

Laravel has Eloquent and it’s an absolute delight to use. I’ve used Rails and Django, and I always felt as if I was fighting the ORM, where as with Eloquent everything just seems natural.

I am a former PHP developer, absolutely loved Laravel and adored Eloquent as the ideal ORM. I switched to Node/JavaScript in 2015 and have been chasing a good ORM since, nothing could ever compare with Eloquent in Nodeland, I all but gave up and started building my own, in TypeScript to match Eloquent as much as possible.

Then Nikolas Burk reached out to me and did his absolute best to convert me, but I was stuck in my ways, it HAD to behave like Eloquent, or it was not good enough and that DSL layer? No thanks, I don't like it.

Started writing code for my own ORM when I was like "What the heck am I doing? this gets me nowhere" And messaged Nikolas back saying I was dropping everything and planned to give Prisma a real solid try.

I'm so glad I did. I LOVE it now. I consider it a part of my GOAT stack.

:heart:

> GraphQL N+1 issues are a thing of the past.

This one I will believe when I see it. It would be a general solution to cache invalidation.

You can disable caching if that's a problem for your application. But the idea is that DataLoader simply holds onto promises that requested an entity, and fires them all in batches according to a scheduler function. In Node.js, the default is to use scheduler magic (relies on how the event loop works).

Here's a small article that explains how the dataloader pattern works under the hood https://www.mikealche.com/software-development/advanced-prom...

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's unclear what's the pros are of Prisma compared to TypeORM. I do find it confusing I always thought Prisma was GraphQL related.

> I do find it confusing I always thought Prisma was GraphQL related.

This is a common misconception that stems from our history as a company and being early contributors to the GraphQL ecosystem. With the move to Prisma 2 however, there is no native GraphQL layer in Prisma any more. I've talked about this extensively in a recent livestream on Youtube [1] if you want to learn more :) There's also this article "How Prisma and GraphQL fit together" [2] that explains the historic dimensions of this if you're interested.

> It's unclear what's the pros are of Prisma compared to TypeORM.

I guess you could argue that one benefit is the superior type-safety Prisma provides [3]. Other folks have also called out that they prefer way how data is modeled with Prisma (via the Prisma schema), the migration system as well as the active maintenance, regular releases, the active community, the support and thorough documentation of Prisma. Ultimately it'll come down to your personal preference though which one is the more appropriate for your project :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMWMPpy4ta4&list=PLz8Iz-Fnk_...

[2] https://www.prisma.io/blog/prisma-and-graphql-mfl5y2r7t49c

[3] https://www.prisma.io/docs/concepts/more/comparisons/prisma-...

I skipped Prisma when I discovered that you were supposed to toss your schema in a single file. There's some ways to get around this but amazed that this is the official way