To be precise, Esqueleto isn't a smaller alternative, it's a layer on top of Persistent that gives you a typed DSL for SQL. It's been pretty nice when I used it

To be precise, Esqueleto isn't a smaller alternative, it's a layer on top of Persistent that gives you a typed DSL for SQL. It's been pretty nice when I used it, most things that I wanted to do in SQL were easily expressed. Exotic SQL functions that weren't available are easily imported in a type-safe way. acid-state is a smaller, no-SQL alternative [1]. [1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/acid-state https://hackage.haskell.org/package/acid-state