https://crates.io/crates/postgres/
https://crates.io/crates/mysql/
This is an experimental approach. It might or might not be useful, but you don't have to use it.
And a lot of them really suck, too, because it's a hard problem. I'll take query builders or raw SQL over ORMs any day of the week.
It seems like the intersection of good use case for Rust and need to use SQL, will also intersect with "minimal SQL needs", hence preference for simpler libraries.
If you're talking about query string construction performance, I'm not sure I've ever seen even a Ruby application where query string building was a bottleneck vs the network.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11045700 <- "Diesel performs 33% faster than rust-postgres, and will be competitive with if not faster than ideomatic C. "
As a side note: I keep trying Rust over and over again, and just can't get in to it. I think my brain just doesn't work that way. For my hobby project that needs super low level perf, I've moved a codebase from C, to Rust, and now to http://terralang.org/ and I'm finally quite satisfied with how the project is going.
Rust focuses on "zero-cost abstractions", that is, if you had to implement a feature yourself, you couldn't do it any better.
So this library, while more complex than a straightforward binding, has more features that are useful, like increased safety, while also being faster. A win-win. And very much in line with Rust's overall philosophy.