Executive Summary

Many engineering teams building semantic search, recommendations, and retrieval-augmented generation use ORMs like Prisma to manage schema migrations, but Prisma's migration system can drop custom HNSW (hierarchical navigable small world) vector indexes that were created outside its schema, causing degraded query performance or outages after deploys. This is particularly painful for startups and mid-size companies that rely on embeddings at scale and need reliable, auditable index lifecycle management in their CI/GitOps pipelines. You could build a Prisma migration plugin that automatically detects, preserves, and recreates custom HNSW and other vector indexes by extracting index definitions, embedding them into migration plans, emitting idempotent SQL for recreation in the correct lifecycle ordering, and integrating with Prisma's migrate CLI and GitOps workflows. Ship an open-source core to drive adoption and offer paid enterprise features—policy enforcement, drift detection, automated testing, and hosted orchestration—for teams that require SLAs and governance. This is a timely opportunity: embedding and vector search are mainstreaming, ORM adoption is rising, and teams expect versioned, auditable index changes; the addressable market is on the order of $6.0B (1M businesses × $6K ACV) with a high market score (88/100) and strong revenue potential (84/100). Low-friction plugins that bridge Prisma and DB-specific features address a real pain point versus the brittle pattern of embedding raw SQL into application migrations. To differentiate, focus on deep Prisma-native integration, a rigorous test harness to prevent index loss, and a go-to-market that combines free community tooling with enterprise controls and hosted runs—partnering with Prisma or gaining community maintainers will materially increase credibility. The honest challenges are maintaining compatibility with upstream Prisma changes and the heterogeneity of database index implementations, which require sustained engineering investment rather than a one-time effort.

Market Opportunity

Prisma migrations drop custom HNSW indexes — preserve via migration plugin targets a $6.0B = 1M businesses x $6K ACV (global developer tool spend for DB migration & DB-ops automation) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 40% (vector search-related DB tooling and developer productivity tools are growing rapidly).

Key trends driving demand: Embedding + vector search mainstreaming -- drives need for DB-native index lifecycle management; ORM adoption (Prisma) vs raw SQL friction -- increased demand for plugins that bridge ORM and DB-specific features; GitOps for schema/migration management -- teams want versioned, auditable index changes; Managed Postgres & cloud DBs add vector features -- more teams run vector indexes in production.

Key competitors include Prisma Migrate (prisma.io), Flyway (Redgate), Liquibase, Manual SQL + pgvector / raw scripts (workaround).

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Prisma migrations drop custom HNSW indexes — preserve via migration plugin

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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