Prisma ORM: Are You Seriously Suggesting I Reset My Production DB?!
If you want to learn how to recover your DB after hitting a schema drift issue or any other scenario where Prisma threatens to erase it, you have come to the right place!
If you’re in a hurry, skip to the last section — but trust me, the journey is worth it!
The Story
I heard that Prisma is an awesome ORM for TypeScript, with lots of good reviews, talks about performance, new kid on the block, etc.
So I started a project that grew quickly, and all seemed well for a few months.
Until one day, it generated a buggy query.
We tried to extend an existing Enum type, but Prisma generated an SQL statement that altered the Enum without taking proper care of a table that was already using it. Kinda’ pulling the rug under the legs, I would say…
We didn’t catch it until it went to Production, where it was scary and also very frustrating to see the following message:
Oh, we should have *not* modified a migration.sql file.
Naively thinking, I responded with “Let’s revert”, but NO, it was too late.
And so the Saga began…
Sidenote: Prisma can check that migration files are not tampered with by saving their checksum into the _prisma_migrations table. I tried this suggestion to workaround it, but unfortunately, it didn’t work for us. Do you have any idea why? (If yes, please comment!).
Looking online in a few different places brought us only deeper into this rabbit hole, and I was shocked to see that Prisma docs also suggested that I reset the DB. Hell, I even ran into other people complaining about it!
I asked for a little help from friends, Claude and ChatGPT, but it only got worse…
While testing this on my local machine, I ran into schema drift, along with other delightful surprises:
We ended up wasting time trying workarounds, and then I fell sick.
Y’all, when you get sick, it’s your body’s way of telling you to hit the damn brakes and stop. So I did. 🤒
While I was “off”, my mind couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I thought about a different approach: What if I had an existing service with a full DB and wanted to adopt Prisma? There has to be a way to remove it completely from the project and then “add it from scratch”.
Removing it should be easy: just delete the ./prisma folder and drop _prisma_migrations Table in the DB. I felt like I was onto something and couldn’t wait for the beginning of the week to try this approach (I forced myself to rest, listening to my body — remember?).
When I started working on it, I found this helpful, but still had to RTFM 🤓 and put the pieces together. I hope this will save you the time that I had to spend!
TD;LR
How to reset Prisma without resetting your DB
The comments not only explain the process but are also very important for not messing up your DB — read them thoroughly!
Disclaimer: I’m not a DBA or a Prisma expert, just an engineer who ran into a problem and found a way out. Prisma actually offers some useful tools — like squashing migrations, generating down-migrations, and marking migrations as applied — so it’s worth learning more about.
Hi, I’m a senior software engineer and a tech lead at Tikal.
Tikal is a hands-on tech consultancy partner for scaling and making a tech impact on tech companies' product development. Tikal practice, driven by the Israeli Tech Radar in the domains of Fullstack, Backend, Data & ML, DevOps, and Mobile, seamlessly integrates into development teams and boosts existing engineering capabilities.
Want to join us? shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to help!
