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by zookatron 2180 days ago
I find it odd that they say "Prisma is ready for production", but "Prisma Migrate is currently in an experimental state and should not be used in production environments". Having a robust migration management system is one of the primary things I look for in an ORM/database management tool in general. The only constant is change when it comes to business requirements, and having the ability to easily and safely change the data model of your application is invaluable. Not having the migration tooling complete makes it difficult for me to seriously justify trying out the Prisma 2 ecosystem in general.
4 comments

That's totally fair! The first version of Prisma 2.0 includes Prisma Client [1] and introspection [2].

Prisma Migrate [3] is indeed still in the works, but we've shifted our focus a lot towards it now and you can expect major progress there over the next few weeks!

We definitely see folks using Prisma Client with production happily in production already, but I agree once Migrate joins the production-ready club, the Prisma package will be fully complete :D

[1] https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/tools-and-interfaces/pr...

[2] https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/tools-and-interfaces/in...

[3] https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/tools-and-interfaces/pr...

As a counter example, Django was "ready for production" for ages before a third-party migration app (South) came along, let alone built-in support
Right. Best practices are all well and good, but the reality is that tons of people are running in production with no migration strategy.

I'm not saying it's not important or that Prism is fine without it. I wouldn't choose software without a tried, tested migration strategy available. Just... To a lot of people I've worked with, migrations are a nice-to-have that will probably never happen.

It was but at the time the state-of-the-art for migrations was to hire a DBA and have them do it. That's much less common now with migrations and database operations being owned by development teams much more, so the need for migration tooling is much higher now, especially in what I expect Prisma's target market is.
There are also several important features, like literally setting a default value for JSON fields or updating the String to be longer than VARCHAR(99) or using LONGTEXT in MySQL that are still open issues.

I think the VC announcement forced them to prematurely launch 2.0.0.

Hello @zookatron,

I'm with the product team at Prisma, currently focusing on migrations.

Your point is valid, hence delivering a production-ready solution for migrations is one of our top priorities.

However, as my colleague @nikolasburk shared above, you can use a third-party migration system (knex, node-pg-migrate, e al) with Prisma and still get all the benefits of Prisma Client.

Prisma is designed to be more powerful if you are using the entire toolkit, but we also want to make it easy to use just specific tools within the kit, if that is what works well for your project.

Feel free to follow along or check us out again in a few months and hopefully by then our migration system will no longer be any kind of friction point. :)