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by pier255 hours ago |
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upvoteby afavour5 hours ago|
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What would a Node-native database connection layer look like? What other platforms have that?

Databases are third party tech, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use a third party NPM module to connect to them.

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upvoteby mike_hearn5 hours ago|
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Most obviously, Java has JDBC. I think .NET has an equivalent. Drivers are needed but they're often first party, coming directly from the DB vendor itself.

Java also has a JIT compiling JS engine that can be sandboxed and given a VFS:

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/security-guide/sandboxing/

N.B. there's a NodeJS compatible mode, but you can't use VFS+sandboxing and NodeJS compatibility together because the NodeJS mode actually uses the real NodeJS codebase, just swapping out V8. For combining it all together you'd want something like https://elide.dev which reimplemented some of the Node APIs on top of the JVM, so it's sandboxable and virtualizable.

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upvoteby LunaSea4 hours ago|
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> Most obviously, Java has JDBC. I think .NET has an equivalent. Drivers are needed but they're often first party, coming directly from the DB vendor itself.

So it's an external dependency that is not part of Java. It doesn't really matter if the code comes from the vendor or not. Especially for OpenSource databases.

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upvoteby zadikian3 hours ago|
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DBMS vendor providing the client is nice. At least if you're using pg-native in Node, that's just a wrapper around the Postgres-owned libpq, but I've run into small breaking updates before that I don't feel would've happened if Postgres maintained both.
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upvoteby afavour59 minutes ago|
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But that’s not Node’s fault surely? Shouldn’t Postgres be providing an NPM module given the popularity of Node?
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upvoteby zadikian55 minutes ago|
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No it's not Node's fault, this isn't their job. I don't blame Postgres either, cause maintaining libpq is fair enough, just would've been extra nice to have an official Node lib too.
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upvoteby mike_hearn3 hours ago|
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Well in the case of Oracle you can get the language, runtime, DB and driver all from the same organization under unified support contracts.

If you don't value that, why would you want your programming language implementors to also implement database drivers?

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upvoteby zadikian3 hours ago|
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Well that's only because Oracle happens to own both Java and Oracle DB. Suppose you're not using that DB.
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upvoteby pier255 hours ago|
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Bun provides native MySQL, SQlite, and Postgres drivers.

I'm not saying Node should support every db in existence but the ones I listed are critical infrastructure at this point.

When using Postgres in Node you either rely on the old pg which pulls 13 dependencies[1] or postgres[2] which is much better and has zero deps but mostly depends on a single guy.

[1] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=pg

[2] https://github.com/porsager/postgres

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upvoteby zadikian50 minutes ago|
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Maybe MySQL and Postgres should make official Node libs then. Bun maintaining this is ok too, but it seems odd given that it means having to keep up with new features in those DBMSes.
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upvoteby pier2531 minutes ago|
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> but it seems odd given that it means having to keep up with new features in those DBMSes

That would be more useful for the ecosystem than the Node team investing time on a virtual file system.

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upvoteby adzm4 hours ago|
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Node has sqlite, though I have not had any issues using better-sqlite3 and worker processes for long running ops
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upvoteby pier252 hours ago|
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Until the day it gets pwned by a malicious actor. Which is something we've seen quite a lot of times on npm deps.
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upvoteby ksherlock5 hours ago|
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Perl has DBI. PHP has PDO.
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upvoteby Spivak4 hours ago|
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Python has DB-API.
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upvoteby beart5 hours ago|
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Outside of sqlite, what runtimes natively include database drivers?
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upvoteby pier255 hours ago|
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Bun, .NET, PHP, Java
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upvoteby Deukhoofd4 hours ago|
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For .NET only the old legacy .NET Framework, SqlClient was moved to a separate package with the rewrite (from System.Data.SqlClient to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient). They realized that it was a rather bad idea to have that baked in to your main runtime, as it complicates your updates.
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upvoteby pier252 hours ago|
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It's still provided by Microsoft. They are responsible for those first party drivers.
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upvoteby LunaSea4 hours ago|
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For Bun you're thinking of simple key / values, hardly a database. They also have a SQLite driver which is still just a package.
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upvoteby pier252 hours ago|
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I think you're confusing the database engine with the driver?
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