Drizzle ORM with NestJS: Migrating Away from TypeORM

TypeORM has been the default ORM for NestJS since the beginning, but Drizzle has overtaken it in new projects — it passed Prisma in weekly npm downloads in early 2026. Drizzle is a SQL-first query builder with full TypeScript inference and no decorators or metadata reflection.

Why Teams Are Switching

• Schema is plain TypeScript — no decorators, no reflect-metadata
• Queries are typed end to end; the result type is inferred from the query itself
• Migrations are generated as readable SQL you can edit
• Smaller runtime and faster cold starts — relevant for serverless and edge

Defining a Schema

import { pgTable, uuid, varchar, text, boolean, timestamp } from 'drizzle-orm/pg-core';
export const posts = pgTable('posts', {
  id: uuid('id').defaultRandom().primaryKey(),
  title: varchar('title').notNull(),
  slug: varchar('slug').notNull().unique(),
  content: text('content').notNull(),
  published: boolean('published').default(false).notNull(),
  createdAt: timestamp('created_at').defaultNow().notNull(),
});

Wiring It Into NestJS

Expose the Drizzle instance as an injectable provider:

import { drizzle } from 'drizzle-orm/node-postgres';
import { Pool } from 'pg';
export const DrizzleProvider = {
  provide: 'DB',
  useFactory: () => {
    const pool = new Pool({ connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL });
    return drizzle(pool, { schema });
  },
};

Querying

@Injectable()
export class BlogService {
  constructor(@Inject('DB') private db: NodePgDatabase<typeof schema>) {}
findPublished() {
    return this.db.query.posts.findMany({
      where: eq(posts.published, true),
      orderBy: desc(posts.createdAt),
    });
  }
}

Migrating From TypeORM

There is no automatic converter. The practical path:

1. Recreate entities as Drizzle schema files
2. Run drizzle-kit introspect against the existing database and diff it against your hand-written schema
3. Replace repository calls service by service — both ORMs can share the same connection pool during the transition

Conclusion

Drizzle trades TypeORM's Active Record convenience for explicit SQL and stronger inference. For a new NestJS service, or one where the query layer has become hard to reason about, it is the current default.