Chapter 6. Slick – A Functional Interface for SQL

In Chapter 5, Scala and SQL through JDBC, we investigated how to access SQL databases with JDBC. As interacting with JDBC feels somewhat unnatural, we extended JDBC using custom wrappers. The wrappers were developed to provide a functional interface to hide the imperative nature of JDBC.

With the difficulty of interacting directly with JDBC from Scala and the ubiquity of SQL databases, you would expect there to be existing Scala libraries that wrap JDBC. Slick is such a library.

Slick styles itself as a functional-relational mapping library, a play on the more traditional object-relational mapping name used to denote libraries that build objects from relational databases. It presents a functional interface to SQL databases, allowing the client to interact with them in a manner similar to native Scala collections.