Why Use Prisma to Build Your Data Layer in 2024?

Contents

• Introduction
• An ORM that scales and grows with your application
  • Get started quickly with Prisma ORM
  • TypedSQL: Flexible type-safe queries when needed
  • Use Prisma ORM in your favorite environment
• Beyond the ORM
  • Real-time database events and event-driven workflows with Pulse
  • Robust and fast queries with Accelerate
  • Query insights and improvements for peak performance with Optimize
  • Visualize and manage your data with ease using Prisma Studio
  • Why larger teams choose Prisma

Introduction

Prisma provides a robust suite of tools for building the data layer of your projects. With years of experience building database tools and insights from thousands of development teams, we’ve carefully designed our products to meet the needs of apps of all sizes—from hobby projects to startups to enterprise-scale:

• The open-source Prisma ORM is the most popular ORM in the Node.js and TypeScript ecosystem and gives you a solid foundation for interacting with your database. A human-readable schema, auto-generated migrations, and intuitive queries make application developers productive and let them build features quickly. Type-safe raw SQL additionally provides the maximum flexibility for advanced queries without sacrificing DX.
• Serious applications require both a database caching layer and efficient connection management to keep queries fast and reduce load on the database server. Manually implementing caching with tools like Redis or handling connection pooling can be complex and error-prone. Prisma Accelerate simplifies this by combining fine-grained cache control (using TTL and SWR parameters per query) with advanced connection pooling, managing reusable database connections efficiently to boost performance and scalability.
• Event-driven architectures are essential for scalable and complex applications. However, building your own event and queuing systems with products like Apache Kafka can quickly become significantly complex. Prisma Pulse reacts to database change events directly from your database and delivers them to your application in a type-safe manner, so you can easily build event-driven and real-time applications.
• Not sure how to make that one database query faster? With Prisma Optimize, you gain deep insights into all queries sent by Prisma ORM and can easily identify how to make them faster. This allows you to ensure that your database queries and your application is running at peak performance. Soon, Optimize will allow you to write better queries even more easily.
• Exploring and interacting with your database should be straightforward, not a chore. Custom tools or raw SQL make it easy to lose sight of your data. Prisma Studio provides a simple tabular interface to quickly view and understand your data, with full CRUD functionality, filtering, sorting, and pagination. It allows seamless navigation of relational data and safe in-place editing, ensuring data integrity.

Accelerate, Pulse, Optimize, and Studio integrate seamlessly with Prisma ORM, offering solutions to engineering teams' common challenges when building applications. These tools free your development teams from the complexities of managing SQL, Redis, Kafka, and custom data management interfaces, allowing them to focus on what truly matters: creating value for your users. With these solutions, you can streamline workflows, enhance performance, and ensure data integrity—all while maintaining an excellent developer experience.

An ORM that scales and grows with your application

Prisma ORM pioneered the idea of type-safe ORMs and has quickly become the most popular ORM in the Node.js and TypeScript ecosystem!

Not only is it the most downloaded TypeScript ORM on npm, it also is the foundation for next-generation web frameworks like RedwoodJS (created by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner) or rising development platforms like Wasp (YC 21) and Amplication (recently raised 6.6M in seed funding).

Get started quickly with Prisma ORM

One of the main benefits of Prisma ORM is that it’s easy to get started! We keep hearing from our community that there was virtually no learning curve thanks to the human-readable schema, easy migrations, and intuitive query API.

Here’s a quick overview of the main workflow with Prisma ORM:

1. Human-readable schema

Prisma ORM comes with its own modeling language that quickly gained popularity among developers:

The VS Code extensionprovides everything you’d imagine for a fantastic DX: syntax highlighting, auto-completion, jump-to-definition,and a lot more!

2. Easy migrations

Here’s the simple command that takes the schema from above and runs the corresponding migration against your database:

Prisma ORM’s migration system is carefully crafted to remove the pain many developers have experienced when it comes to changing their database schemas throughout their careers.

With workflows that consider all stages—from development to production—and are designed to provide predictable migrations whether you’re working by yourself on your local machine or in your team’s CI environment, it’s the perfect foundation for rapid and secure development.

3. Intuitive queries

Prisma ORM provides an intuitive API for the CRUD queries that make up the majority of your apps’ data needs. As developers building features for our users, we frequently need things like filters and pagination as well as easy ways to work with relations and nested objects.

Prisma ORM’s powerful query API takes care of all of these needs with intuitive and performant queries (while returning fully typed results):

TypedSQL: Flexible type-safe queries when needed

While we saw that this intuitive, high-level API was serving the majority of our users' needs, we also learned that there are cases when it’s beneficial to benefit from the full flexibility raw SQL provides.

In our commitment to providing a great developer experience, we recently introduced TypedSQL—the best way to write raw SQL and get fully typed results!

Just write your custom SQL query in a dedicated file…

… run the prisma generate --sql command and use the generated query functions to get fully typed results:

Use Prisma ORM in your favorite environment

Prisma ORM was built when the default deployment model consisted of long-running servers deployed on platforms like AWS EC2, DigitalOcean, and Heroku.

Since then, the infrastructure landscape has evolved a lot, and Prisma ORM along with it. Prisma ORM is the perfect companion if you deploy your apps in serverless or edge environments and support for working with databases in mobile apps using React Native and Expo is in early access.

A mature and growing ecosystem

We’re incredibly proud of our community which has contributed so much to the growth of Prisma over the years. Thank you! ❤️

Community tools for even better Prisma ORM workflows

In addition to Prisma ORM being the default database library in many next-generation frameworks and development tools, the Prisma community has built a vast amount of diverse tooling that makes development with Prisma ORM even more delightful.

Starting with Prisma Client in other languages (like Python or Go), to Prisma-based DSLs such as Zenstack, to generators (e.g. for visualizing DB schemas or generating Zod types), and numerous other tools like middlewares, Client extensions, CLIs, and more! Take a look at our Ecosystem page to see our showcased tools.

We are grateful for the active and thriving community that continues to build valuable tools for the Prisma ecosystem.

Real-world open-source projects built on Prisma ORM

Finally, we’re excited to see the usage of Prisma ORM in real-world open-source projects. From indie hacking projects to funded startups, these example projects are a great reference if you want to see what production-grade applications look like when built on top of Prisma ORM!

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the interviews with the founders of open-source companies we’ve published on YouTube.

Beyond the ORM

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the value Prisma provides doesn’t stop at the ORM. We have seen that mission-critical applications over time grow in their needs for additional features and infrastructure, so we have built the tools that address these needs.

Real-time database events and event-driven workflows with Pulse

In today’s fast-paced world, applications need to be more responsive and reactive than ever before. Users expect real-time updates, whether they’re tracking live sports scores, following stock market changes, or using collaborative tools. Building these capabilities from scratch is complex and time-consuming, requiring extensive knowledge of event-driven architectures and real-time data streaming. Prisma Pulse simplifies this process, allowing you to effortlessly integrate real-time database events into your applications. With Prisma Pulse, you can focus on delivering dynamic, engaging user experiences without the overhead of managing intricate infrastructure.

The simplest way to react to changes in your database

With Pulse, reacting to database change events in your application is as easy as:

1. Connecting your database to Prisma Pulse
2. Installing the Pulse extension for Prisma Client
3. Start streaming database changes with Prisma Client

Prisma Client provides a powerful API to stream database change events. In its simplest form, you can stream every write-operation that happens on a given model (e.g. one called Message in the following example) like so:

If you have more specific requirements about the events you want to have delivered to your app, you can pass filters. For example, you can filter for only deleted messages or messages created by a certain user:

Only stream new messages from a certain user

Check out our ready-to-run examples (such as a live leaderboard or chat application) to try out Prisma Pulse.

A real-time chat app is only one of the use cases you can easily build with Prisma Pulse.

Robust and fast queries with Accelerate

Prisma Accelerate is a managed connection pooler and global caching layer that helps speed up database queries. With Accelerate, you can easily configure connection pooling and choose the right cache strategy for your app based on Time-To-Live (TTL) and Stale-While-Revalidate (SRW) parameters.

Ready to speed up your database queries? Check out the Speed Test to see the performance gains you can get with Accelerate.

An external connection pool is critical for serverless apps

If you’re building a serverless app that connects to a traditional database like PostgreSQL or MySQL, you’re probably aware that your database may run out of available connection slots in situations of high traffic.

That is because every serverless function will open a new connection to your database. During traffic spikes with hundreds or thousands of functions being spawned at the same time, the database won’t be able to provide any new connection slots and requests from your functions will start to fail—leaving you with a bad UX and frustrated users.

Adding an external connection pooler on top of your database will ensure that your database doesn’t break down during periods of high traffic.

Learn more about the benefits of connection pooling in our recent article: Saving Black Friday With Connection Pooling

Caching makes queries fast, reduces database load and saves costs

Manually building a caching layer for your database using tools like Redis is time-consuming and error-prone. Managing the Redis infrastructure, replicating it globally, implementing caching options based on TTL and SWR and ensuring clean cache invalidation logic is a complex task suited to keep an entire engineering team busy.

Accelerate gives you the benefits of a global database cache without the overhead of managing any caching infrastructure and implementing caching logic yourself. It integrates seamlessly with Prisma ORM and lets you control the caching behavior on a per-query level to ensure all your database queries perform at optimal speed.

To start caching database queries, simply connect your database with Accelerate, install the Accelerate extension for Prisma Client and start configuring the cache behaviour for individual queries using the ttl and swr options, for example:

You can learn more about the benefits of database caching in our recent blog post: Speed and Savings: Caching Database Queries with Prisma Accelerate

Query insights and improvements for peak performance with Optimize

In modern applications, performance is critical, and slow database queries can be a significant bottleneck. Poorly optimized queries and inefficient database configurations often lead to sluggish application performance, frustrating users and affecting business outcomes. Prisma Optimize tackles these challenges head-on by providing developers with deep insights into query performance and allowing them to make improvements to these queries.

Optimize provides a powerful way to analyze and optimize your database queries. By automatically capturing detailed metrics, like query latency, it allows you to pinpoint exactly where your application is losing performance. You can easily view and analyze raw SQL statements and understand the operations happening behind the scenes, giving you clarity on how your database is being utilized.

Keep an eye on Optimize, we have some exciting new features coming soon! 👀

Visualize and manage your data with ease using Prisma Studio

Managing your database doesn’t have to be a complex task filled with raw SQL queries and command-line tools. Prisma Studio offers a user-friendly, visual interface that simplifies the way developers interact with their databases. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, Prisma Studio empowers you to explore, understand, and manipulate your data effortlessly.

Intuitive data exploration and management

Prisma Studio provides a simple yet powerful tabular interface that allows you to quickly view and understand the data in your database. With full CRUD functionality, you can easily create, read, update, and delete records directly from the interface without writing SQL. The intuitive layout lets you filter, sort, and paginate through data, making it easier to locate specific records and understand data patterns.

Effortlessly navigate relationships

Relational databases often involve complex relationships between different tables. Prisma Studio makes navigating these relationships seamless by allowing you to click on relational fields and drill down into related data. This makes it easy to view and edit related records, all while maintaining data integrity.

Safe, in-place editing for secure data management

Editing data directly in a database can be risky, but Prisma Studio minimizes this risk with its in-place editing feature. Just like in a spreadsheet, you can double-click a cell to edit its value, but all changes must be confirmed before they’re applied. This ensures that accidental edits are avoided and your data remains consistent and accurate.

Why larger teams choose Prisma

Prisma isn’t just for hobby projects or startups; it’s built to support the needs of mature teams and enterprise companies. With a robust suite of tools, Prisma provides comprehensive solutions that are both scalable and secure:

• Compliance and Certifications: Prisma’s tools are certified for SOC2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO27001, ensuring they meet the highest standards for security and privacy. This makes Prisma a trusted choice for industries with stringent regulatory requirements.
• Reliability and Support: Prisma offers dedicated support, including SLAs for commercial products like Accelerate and Pulse. Our enterprise customers benefit from guaranteed response times and priority assistance, ensuring minimal downtime and faster issue resolution.
• Mature Ecosystem: With a mature, battle-tested ORM and tools that integrate seamlessly, Prisma supports enterprise-grade performance and scalability. Features like query optimization, real-time event streaming, and a visual data management interface enable teams to handle complex use cases efficiently.
• Proven in the Enterprise: Many large-scale enterprises trust Prisma to handle their data layer needs, demonstrating its capability to support mission-critical applications with reliability and robustness.

Prisma is more than just a development tool—it’s a comprehensive solution for building scalable, high-performance applications that meet the demands of teams and applications of all sizes.