Prisma ORM Manifesto: Clarity and Collaboration

Refocusing for the Future

Prisma has come a long way, and we’re proud of what we’ve achieved together. From Accelerate and Pulse to TypedSQL and Prisma Postgres, the tools we’ve built have grown alongside an incredible community of developers who rely on Prisma every day.

But as the scope of Prisma ORM has expanded, we’ve faced challenges in governance, issue management, and communication. Priorities haven’t always been clear, deadlines haven’t been consistently met, and over time, we’ve accumulated 3.2k open issues and a backlog of preview features stretching back years.

We want to do better—so here’s what we’re changing.

This manifesto is a declaration of what we’re going to do differently—how we’ll set clear priorities, manage our work more effectively, and involve you, our community, every step of the way. If you feel something important isn’t represented here, open a discussion—we’re listening.

Where We Stand Today

Prisma powers 547,000 repositories on GitHub, serves over 400,000 monthly active developers, and delivers upwards of 9 million monthly NPM downloads. Over the years, we’ve achieved a lot:

• 200 releases
• 5537 pull requests merged
• 7511 issues closed

These numbers highlight our progress, but we know there’s more to do to ensure our community feels valued and supported. With so many developers and organisations depending on Prisma ORM, it’s important that development happens in close collaboration with the community, and that the Prisma team work according to a clear and well defined set of principles.

How We’re Changing

We’re setting a clear path for the future so you know what to expect from us, focusing on product direction, issue management, feature development, and building a stronger relationship with the Prisma community. Here’s how we’re moving forward:

1. Defining First-Class Databases

We’re going to be focusing heavily on the databases that matter most to our community, customers, and our partners (derived from usage data and community engagement to date). Moving forward, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, and MariaDB will be our First-Class Databases (FCDBs).

What This Means:

• Prioritization: These databases will receive our primary attention for bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features.
• Innovation: Future product developments will be designed with FCDBs in mind, ensuring seamless integration and compatibility.
• Community Contributions: For databases outside this group, we provide clear points of extension to enable the community to meet its own needs. Developers can extend Prisma’s capabilities by creating custom database adapters, adding support for additional databases. Guidance on building and using these adapters is available in our documentation.
• Enterprise Support: Organizations requiring official support for non-FCDBs can explore our enterprise support plans.

By focusing on this core set of databases, we want to ensure the highest quality and reliability for the tools you depend on, while also empowering our community to expand Prisma’s reach. As usage and demand change, we’ll re-evaluate our First-Class Databases to ensure they reflect the needs of our community, customers and partners.

2. Clearer Issue Management, Community Prioritization and Engagement

With over 3,000 open issues on our GitHub repository, it’s been challenging to respond quickly and effectively. To address this, we’re adopting a more structured approach to ensure your feedback shapes our priorities and drives meaningful progress.

Why This Matters

A well-organized set of issues helps us focus on what’s most important and impactful. We deeply value the time and effort you’ve put into raising and discussing issues—it’s what drives Prisma forward. To ensure clarity and sustainability, we’re committing to organizing our backlog, closing outdated issues, and using automation to scale our ability to engage with you.

What You Can Expect

1. Reviewing, Organizing, and Closing
   • Over the next few weeks, you’ll see more activity on GitHub as we review, update, and organize existing issues.
   • Some issues will be closed if they’re outdated, already addressed, or no longer aligned with our roadmap. This is essential to ensure the remaining issues are relevant and actionable.
   • We’ll provide timelines, labels, and priorities to clarify how and when we plan to address specific items.
   • If we close an issue that is relevant to your team/org and it does not have enough community support, then you can always explore the option of a direct relationship with us through our enterprise support plans.
2. Community-Driven Prioritization
   • Issues with the most upvotes and comments will take priority, ensuring your voice shapes our roadmap. Since adopting this policy in January 2024, we’ve released highly requested features like better RAW SQL support, global omit, and multiple schema files.
   • Bugs and features for First-Class Databases will take precedence, while others will depend on community contributions or enterprise sponsorship.
3. Issue Automation In Partnership With Dosu
   • We’re partnering with Dosu to help us engage faster and manage our growing volume of Github issues. Just as AI has enabled us to handle over 500 daily questions in our documentation (thanks to Kapa), we’re hopeful Dosu will enable us to craft thoughtful responses, maintain effective engagement, and resolve more issues on GitHub.

By streamlining issue management and focusing on what matters most, we’re building a foundation for faster responses and more meaningful progress.

3. Predictable Preview Feature Lifecycle

We’re making a big change to how we handle preview features. From now on, if we release a feature to Preview this quarter, you can expect it to reach General Availability (GA) next quarter. Work we’ve done should get into your hands as soon as possible, not sit indefinitely in Preview.

What’s Changing:

1. Commitment to Delivery
   • A feature will only move to Preview if we’re confident it’ll make it to GA.
   • We’re no longer using Preview as a place to test whether a feature itself is viable. If a feature is in Preview, we’re testing the implementation, not the concept. If our approach doesn’t work, we’ll issue an update and try a different tack.
2. Clearing the Backlog
   • We’ll review all existing Preview features and either commit to them with clear timelines or deprecate them.

By committing to a predictable timeline from Preview to GA, we’re ensuring features don’t stagnate and the work we do benefits you as quickly as possible. Preview will now mean progress, not uncertainty.

4. Enabling Community Extension and Collaboration

Prisma’s architecture has historically limited community contributions. Core functionality—such as query parsing, validation, and execution—has been managed by our Rust engine, which has been opaque to our TypeScript-focused community. Expanding capabilities or fixing core issues often fell solely to our team.

We’re addressing this by migrating Prisma’s core logic from Rust to TypeScript and redesigning the ORM to make customization and extension easier.

What This Means:

• Core in TypeScript: A more accessible and open architecture for TypeScript developers
• Extensibility by Design: Clear paths for customization by end users and extension by the community
• Collaborative Growth: An approachable codebase empowers the community to address issues and add capabilities directly

By making Prisma more open and extensible, we’re ensuring the project evolves through collaboration—not just by our team, but with contributions from the entire community.

How We’ll Stay Engaged

Open source thrives on collaboration, and we’re making changes to ensure our connection with our community stays strong and transparent:

• GitHub as the Core: GitHub Issues will be our primary platform for feature requests, bug reports, and community feedback. For help or questions, head to GitHub Discussions, where our support team will respond.
• Discord: Discord will remain the place for real-time discussions, where community members can connect and help each other.
• Monthly AMAs: Starting in 2025, we’ll host monthly “Ask Me Anything” sessions (on Discord, so join us there now!) to answer your questions, share updates, and get your feedback.

Guiding Principles

As we move forward, these principles will shape how we work and deliver value to our community:

1. Developer-First: We design tools with developers in mind, prioritizing usability, productivity, and empowering teams to build great products with ease.
2. Focus on Quality: We maintain high standards for performance, stability, and maintainability by rigorously testing our tools and prioritizing reliability in every release.
3. Open and Transparent: We commit to clear communication—sharing our priorities, decisions, and progress openly through GitHub, roadmaps, and community discussions.
4. Collaborative: We actively seek input from our community, incorporating feedback into our roadmap and creating opportunities for collaboration through clear extension points and contribution paths.
5. Continuous Improvement: We embrace feedback, stay at the forefront of technological advancements, and iterate quickly to ensure Prisma evolves to meet the needs of developers today and tomorrow.

Moving Forward—Together: Our Commitment to You

These aren’t empty promises—we’re here to deliver. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see us organizing issues in our repository, fixing bugs, and delivering preview features. If we ever fall short, call us out.

We’ll prioritize what matters most to you. Raise an issue, contribute code, or share your thoughts - we want you involved. Join us on Discord, keep pushing us on GitHub, and let’s build a better Prisma—together.

—

Will Madden Prisma Engineering Manager, Core Team