Taking the Drizzle Challenge

We're starting a new project and we've used Drizzle for the past two weeks and started having issues around migrations. For example, if we wanted to remove a table, removing the drizzle schema def doesn't generate a migration for it.

What's worse is there's no traditional up / down migration for those familiar with knex. There's no "down" at all from what we saw.

There is an issue opened on Drizzle about it and they say they've started work on an up/down migrator, but who knows when that will be done.

https://github.com/drizzle-team/drizzle-orm/discussions/1339

So I've spent the past day converting everything to Kysely instead. ChatGPT was pretty good about converting from Drizzle to Kysely if you fed it the Drizzle schema and repository code.

In terms of developer experience, (maybe we didn't play around with it enough), Drizzle returns things as arrays in postgres, whereas in Kysely you can have it return a single item (or throw it if you want if it can't be found) instead of an array. It's a slight annoyance to have to de-structure the results in drizzle for a single item.

Overall for us, the deal-breaker was the sub-par and too-magical migrations in Drizzle. If you wanted to write custom business logic for your migration, it seems like you had to write it in the generated SQL files directly.

Compare this to Kysely, where you have a knex-style up/down and can write your business logic and migration changes in Typescript.

Drizzle Studio via drizzle-kit, however, is pretty great, and we're continuing to use that since it doesn't require any drizzle-specific schema defs to work.

I would recommend Kysely over Drizzle at this point in time and re-evaluate once Drizzle has a better experience around migrations.

Seriously folks - just write straight up SQL. Your database is incredibly powerful and the best way to program it is with SQL.

There's a vast array of features and capabilities that can best be made use of by ........ writing SQL.

ChatGPT is incredibly good at writing SQL so its super easy.

AND, BONUS ...... you get to carry accumulated knowledge forward because you are actually learning SQL instead of yet another abstraction.

Write stored procedures - they are awesome, write SQL that returns JSON, use all those weird and wonderful database features like JSON querying storage, indexing and returns, like full text search, write CTE's, write event triggers, write Row Based Access Control, make message queues with SKIP LOCKED. Write Foreign Data Wrappers, make partial indexes and window functions.

Stop being scared of SQL, stop needing to hide behind someone's database abstraction and learn the joy of SQL. Let the database do the work.

Drizzle is decent - but it’s not ready for production. Drizzle studio is buggy and broken. Nested select filters just don’t exist. The most important thing they can do is release the new query API v2, but it’s still in early days of development.

Prisma is now taking a lot of ideas from the drizzle team, if I were to start over again I’d just use prisma as it’s actually production ready and is starting to incorporate the good parts of drizzle.

It looks like as an ORM gets more expressive it looks more like regular SQL. What is a reasonable argument for using an ORM over writing SQL?

I always feel like I'm missing something because it looks like you have to learn a specific library instead of a general purpose language.

Drizzle looks too syntax heavy. Might has well write raw sql. However, this Rado looks very nice.