Database and Migration Boundaries in Elpod

Use your own database driver or ORM with Elpod providers; application code owns migrations, transactions, and deployment policy.

Elpod does not prescribe a database driver or ORM for Elysia on Bun. Register your chosen client as a provider when services need explicit ownership of connections and test substitutes; keep schema and migration policy in the application.

The idea

Persistence is application infrastructure. Mature tools already own the hard parts: connection management, queries, transactions, schemas, and migrations. Elpod stays out of that domain so the application can choose Prisma, Drizzle, Kysely, or a native driver without a second abstraction layer.

How it fits Elpod

Register the selected client as an application-scoped provider. Providers with initialize() and dispose() participate in Elpod’s lifecycle; services then use the native client directly.

import { PrismaClient } from "@prisma/client";

export class PrismaDatabase {
  readonly client = new PrismaClient();

  initialize() {
    return this.client.$connect();
  }

  dispose() {
    return this.client.$disconnect();
  }
}

Register PrismaDatabase in application({ providers }), inject it into the services that need it, and call database.client.user.findMany() or Prisma’s normal transaction API. The same pattern works for any other client.

Schema and migrations

The selected persistence tool owns schema and migrations. For example, Prisma owns schema.prisma, generated types, and its migration history; Drizzle owns its TypeScript schema and generated SQL migrations. Run the tool’s migration command once as a coordinated release task before application replicas start.

Common mistakes

Creating a client per request instead of one application-scoped client per process.
Defining the same schema or migration in two systems.
Running the ORM’s migration command concurrently on every replica.
Hiding ORM queries behind a generic repository that removes the ORM’s useful capabilities.

Production notes

Choose pool sizing, TLS, credentials, transaction isolation, backups, replicas, schema ownership, and lock semantics in the ORM, driver, and deployment layer. Keep migration rollback an application-specific data operation, not a universal undo guarantee.

Provider boundaries · Testing · Graceful shutdown.