From TypeOrm to Prisma migration

[MaloLebrin]

What do you think about migrating from typeOrm to prisma? Because typeorm is not well maintained, and has a lot of weak points on a large scal.

[BracketJohn]

What advantages do you see for prisma / what disadvantages do you see for TypeORM?

We've used both and working with prisma was super cumbersome because:

• the DB schema is not defined in TS but in their own customer language -> this means another learning steps for devs who want to work on your project!
• the type-generate step that is necessary to run every time you change your schema slows down the development process,
• some backends and some queries are not easy to support / write with it, e.g., json operations are very limited

This is why after first using prisma, we switchted to TypeORM. With ~30k stars and the most recent commit being from 4 days ago, it also seems rather well maintained to us (:

[BracketJohn]

The schema is defined using Entity class, and on connect, TypeORM automatically sync schema and database, which would cause unexpected result

this is false / only true when misconfigured: you can turn this setting on / off using the synchronize option

Poor performance on large scale
Database randomly disconnect
No ESM support

do you have evidence for these?

---

anyways, coming back to this, probably @ruheni: I found some internal gripes we had when using prisma in the past:

• no support for rollbacks -> I think this was fixed and there is support now (see https://www.prisma.io/docs/guides/database/developing-with-prisma-migrate/generating-down-migrations)
• prisma does not support the programmatic actions: you absolutely have to use the CLI for this, you can't do prisma.migrate('up') -> unresolved, I think one can still only use the CLI?
• prisma does not allow reactive updated by assingment, e.g., the following pattern does not worL

  audit.status = 'resolved'
  prisma.commit()

  • this forces one to always write queries using the prisma client
• JSON fields are not supported well, e.g., postgres style select support still outstanding: Option to select inside Json fields prisma/prisma#2431

Each individual one of these would probably not be a blocker for us, but the combination of them lead to a unpleasent experience when we tried to use Prisma in our project - maybe we're missing something that addresses these?

[djschilling]

i would like to add to @BracketJohn points.

We also started using Prisma in a project and later migrated to TypeOrm.
For us the auto generated schema did not work from time to time and debugging this was really a pain.
TypeOrm does less magic and i can fix most of the errors that appear there more easily.

So i like the decision to use TypeOrm

[HigherOrderLogic]

do you have evidence for these?

For ESM support, it has been added in typeorm/typeorm#8536. I haven't used TypoORM in a long time so my information was wrong. And about poor performance on large scale and randomly disconnect, this is something I saw when deploying a Discord bot with about 200 requests per sec, and I don't keep the log so I don't have any evidence to show.

[BracketJohn]

Welp - I've also had longer discussions with people reaching out on discord (https://discord.gg/9MUHR8WT9B) and we figured that it now is best to move to prisma ORM 🎊

So, good news for most people who are part of this thread. Track #80 for progress on this.

[BracketJohn]

Switch is completed -> @MaloLebrin your initial ask should now be completed ❤️ 💯 Consider to mark this question as answered if there is nothing more.