Database Access — Drizzle / Prisma

Both Drizzle and Prisma work in Nitro server routes. Drizzle is the better choice for edge runtimes; Prisma works well on Node-based deployments.

4 min read Level 2/5 #nuxt#database#orm

What you'll learn

Install either drizzle-orm or prisma and configure your schema
Define a singleton client in server/utils so it's reused across requests
Query the database from a handler and return typed results

Real apps need a database. Drizzle and Prisma both work cleanly inside Nitro server routes — they differ mostly in runtime compatibility and ergonomic preferences.

Option 1: Drizzle

npm i drizzle-orm postgres
npm i -D drizzle-kit

Define a schema:

// server/db/schema.ts
import { pgTable, serial, text, timestamp } from 'drizzle-orm/pg-core'

export const users = pgTable('users', {
  id: serial('id').primaryKey(),
  email: text('email').notNull().unique(),
  createdAt: timestamp('created_at').defaultNow().notNull(),
})

Singleton client:

// server/utils/db.ts
import { drizzle } from 'drizzle-orm/postgres-js'
import postgres from 'postgres'

const client = postgres(useRuntimeConfig().dbUrl)
export const db = drizzle(client)

Query from a route:

// server/api/users.get.ts
import { users } from '~/server/db/schema'

export default defineEventHandler(async () => {
  return await db.select().from(users)
})

Option 2: Prisma

npm i @prisma/client
npm i -D prisma
npx prisma init

// server/utils/prisma.ts
import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'

const globalForPrisma = globalThis as unknown as { prisma?: PrismaClient }
export const prisma = globalForPrisma.prisma ?? new PrismaClient()
if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production') globalForPrisma.prisma = prisma

// server/api/users.get.ts
export default defineEventHandler(async () => {
  return await prisma.user.findMany()
})

Edge Runtimes

Cloudflare Workers and similar edge runtimes don’t allow TCP sockets, so the classic postgres driver won’t work. Options:

Neon serverless driver with Drizzle: HTTP-based, works on edge.
Prisma Accelerate / Data Proxy: HTTP proxy in front of your DB.
Cloudflare D1 (SQLite): native to Workers, supported by Drizzle.

Migrations

Drizzle: drizzle-kit generate produces SQL, then run drizzle-kit migrate.
Prisma: prisma migrate dev and prisma migrate deploy.

Run them in your CI pipeline before the app deploys, not at runtime.

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