NInikolasburk·Sep 16, 2022
Hey there, I'm Nikolas from the Prisma team. Just came here to quickly clarify this notion:
> Prisma is an API server that puts a GraphQL API in front of a DB.
Prisma is an ORM which generates a JavaScript/TypeScript client library for your database.
Your description is very true for Prisma 1 (which has been in maintenance mode for several years and is officially deprecated by now [1]), but the latest version(s) of Prisma (v2+) don't expose a GraphQL API any more. Prisma 1 also used GraphQL SDL for data modeling, the Prisma ORM on the other hand has its own, custom modeling language for describing database schemas in a declarative way and also comes with a flexible migration system.
That being said (and as Jens also mentioned elsewhere), the Prisma ORM does use GraphQL _internally_ as a wire protocol. However, as a developer, you _never_
Read the rest
touch this internal GraphQL layer and are not even supposed to be aware of it (you actually have to jump through a lot of hoops to even "find" it). It's also very likely that we'll replace GraphQL as a wire protocol in the future, so "GraphQL" really isn't something you should be thinking about as a developer who is using Prisma.
Hope that clarifies the situation a bit, let me know if you have any further questions around this topic.
[1] https://github.com/prisma/prisma1/issues/5208