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prisma
orm
TypeScript2018–2026
prisma / orm

orm

The Prisma ORM: write your application in TypeScript with human-readable queries instead of SQL. Host your database on Prisma Postgres and your app on Prisma Compute.

Command LineWeb DevelopmentData & DatabasesSystems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
49Distinct people
74Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
47.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Prisma ORM: write your application in TypeScript with human-readable queries instead of SQL. Host your database on Prisma Postgres and your app on Prisma Compute.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I love Prisma and am a huge fan of Nexus[1] in particular. But it's interesting that you mention transactions as Prisma does not yet support long running transactions[2]. I…

string used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year74 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-12-03 19:57:14 UTC to 2026-09-16 17:43:54 UTC.

0510152018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 1 submissions, 15 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 2 submissions, 12 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16115
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14212
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

74 sources
tonymillion·Sep 16, 2026
I tried to read this article but something about the writing style made me go cross eyed. That being said, it sounded like something I had heard before and lo and behold... Literally raised 4 years ago: https://github.com/prisma/orm/discussions/15164 I'm not sure the real intention of this blogpost, but my takeaway is "someone who has no idea what is going on finds a problem <LLM OF CHOICE> left for them, like a little code land mine".
In Prisma's pgbouncer=true on Supabase made every query 4 round-trips (postmortem)
Tadpole9181·May 15, 2025
> I can't tell if they're operating on some kind of deep insight that is way above my experience and I just don't understand it This is answered at the very top of the link on the post you replied to. In no unclear language, no less. Direct link here: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/19748#discussio... > I want to elaborate a bit on the tradeoffs of this decision. The reason Prisma uses this strategy is because in a lot of real-world applications with large datasets, DB-level JOINs can become quite expensive... > The total cost of executing a complex join is often higher than executing multiple simpler queries. This is why the Prisma query engine currently defaults to multiple simple queries in order to optimise overall throughput of the system. > But Prisma is designed towards generalized best practices, and in the "real wor
Read the rest
ld" with huge tables and hundreds of fields, single queries are not the best approach... > All that being said, there are of course scenarios where JOINs are a lot more performance than sending individual queries. We know this and that's why we are currently working on enabling JOINs in Prisma Client queries as well You can follow the development on the roadmap. Though this isn't a complete answer still. Part of it is that Prisma was, at its start, a GraphQL-centric ORM. This comes with its own performance pitfalls, and decomposing joins into separate subqueries with aggregation helped avoid them.
In Migrating to Postgres
sgarland·May 14, 2025
It is forever enraging to me that ORMs turn SELECT * into each individual column, mostly because people then post the whole thing and it’s obnoxiously large. Similarly maddening, the appalling lack of normalization that is simply taken for granted. “It’s faster, bro.” No, no, it is not. Especially not at the hundreds of millions or billions of rows scale. If you store something low-cardinality like a status column, with an average length of perhaps 7 characters, that’s 8 bytes (1 byte overhead assumed, but it could be 2). Multiply that by 2 billion rows, and you’re wasting 16 GB. Disk is cheap, but a. Memory isn’t b. Don’t be lazy. There’s a right way to use an RDBMS, and a wrong way. If you want a KV store, use a damn KV store. Finally, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out that Prisma is an unbelievably immature organization who launch
Read the rest
ed without the ability to do JOINS [0]. They are forever dead to me for that. This isn’t “move fast and break things,” it’s “move fast despite having zero clue what we’re doing but convince JS devs that we do.” [0]: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/19748
In Migrating to Postgres
CharlieDigital·Nov 11, 2024
> C# culture is closer to enterprise Java than it is to Typescript I mean, this really depends on what you're looking at. Here's a sample from the MongoDB client: https://github.com/mongodb/node-mongodb-native/blob/main/src... Here's a sample from Storybook: https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/blob/next/code/core... Here's a sample from Prisma: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/blob/main/packages/client/s... Here's a sample from Cal.com: https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/blob/main/packages/core/Ev... These are all fairly mainstream repos so it's not a one off to see "enterprise" style coding in TypeScript. It's rather the specific use case that determines the style of the code that's written. In the examples above, there's no need for the teams to choose JavaScript classes and inheritance to model the logic, yet it likely better fit
Read the rest
s the programming model of those modules. Look at Nest.js as well: https://github.com/nestjs/nest/blob/master/packages/core/rou... The whole codebase of Nest.js looks an awful lot like Spring or ASP.NET (controller syntax) probably because there's a lot of crossover in terms of what APIs need at scale and how to logically organize that logic. It just so happens that most use cases for C# and Java favor applications at a larger scale. Another key difference being object scope and lifecycles -- something that rarely comes into play in the generally single-threaded Node runtime. This being one of the key reasons why dependency injection is a thing in C# and Java land.
In What's New in F# 9

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