Somewhat off topic, as someone who hasn't used PostgreSQL and only has experience with mysql/MariaDB... I've never liked writing queries with numbered parameters from an array with placeholders like $1 in this example. I find them much easier to read and debug when I pass them with string keys, basically:

`UPDATE t SET x=:x WHERE 1` `{x:42}`

I found that the original node-mysql didn't even allow this, so I wrote my own parser on top of it. But I don't see this style of binding used in examples very often. Is it frowned upon for some reason?

This is basically how we do it in .NET. With Dapper it’s particularly neat sometimes because you can just pass an object that you were using anyway, and it will match parameter names to its properties case-insensitively.

I.e.

Query("select * from MyTable where Id = @Id", myEntity)

The idiom is to use anonymous objects which you can new up inline like “new { id, age = 5 }”, where id is an existing variable that will automatically lend its name. So it’s pretty concise.

The syntax is Sql Server native (which supports named params at the protocol level), but the Npgsql dat provider converts it to PG’s positional system automatically.

PostgreSQL uses the format $1, $2 in the protocol, so I think it's just that nobody has bothered to implement named parameters in clients.

In another style, postgres.js uses calls such as sql`select * from t where id = ${variable}` (which is safe because it's a tagged template, not string interpolation).