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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

If Prisma had focused on a single database (probably Postgres) or a single paradigm (probably SQL) it would have been a better product.

They have to abstract multiple db paradigms into an API that works for many use cases but doesn't get you all the way there. Eg: Last time I checked they didn't support listen/notify on Postgres.

Also overall performance has been lacking which I suspect is also a symptom of trying to support too many dbs. They recently released v6 and made claims of performance improvements but afaik offer no data to back up these claims [1]. It's all very "trust me bro it's faster".

Drizzle still hasn't reached 1.0 but they created a much better ORM in a fraction of the time (and probably budget).

[1] https://www.prisma.io/blog/prisma-6-better-performance-more-...

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Focusing on a single db was not the original intent as migrations was a big reason why the ORM product category became (and still remains) popular.

As for performance, you are right. We do take a hit when trying to support as many DBs as possible. However, performance is not an issue. Take a look at https://benchmarks.prisma.io. Regardless, we're always open to being given examples whereby we can dig into performance related issues. So if you have any, please send them our way.

I'm surprised about what you say regarding migrations. Personally I don't know any dev that uses automatic migrations even with extremely mature ORMs like Entity Framework.

> performance is not an issue

No offense but I gotta say, those benchmarks look a bit off.

To begin with, why are you only comparing vs other ORMs instead of adding a baseline of handwritten SQL code?

Second, it's not clear how big the data set is. In the repo it seems the default size is 50 rows. Is that what you used for the results in the website?

Third, how can Drizzle take 1300ms to do such a lightweight query with a single join? Something is obviously wrong here considering Drizzle creates a single SQL query. Did you prepare the statements? Are you even using the latest version?

On top of that... it seems Prisma is taking +50ms to do a single join on two tables with 50 rows which means it would execute 20 queries per second. Not exactly performant.

We use Prisma in part due to its migration support, I want it to Just Work™ and not have to deal with writing manual migrations every time, it's a common feature request of many ORMs if they don't have it.

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