Kysely

If you're tired of ORMs abstracting away SQL or plain query strings losing type safety at runtime, this is the middle ground. You get full TypeScript inference from schema to results without the overhead of an ORM. Define your database types once, then chain selectFrom, where, and joins with complete autocomplete and compile-time checks. It includes migrations, works across Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite, and lets you drop into raw SQL when you need it. The kysely-codegen tool generates types directly from your existing database, so you're not manually syncing schemas. It's legitimately just a query builder that compiles to SQL, nothing more, which is exactly the point.