> My current comfort zone is if I can find a query builder that has enough static typing that it has all of the keywords of my preferred SQL flavor, has prepared statements with placeholders- mainly for safety/security, and basically returns a string when you're done.

Some self-promotion (shameless, I know): https://github.com/lelanthran/libsqldb/tree/v1.0.0-rc2

I'm intending to rewrite it ("the first one is always to throw away" - I put too much unnecessary functionality into it and not enough RDBMS server backends) but I've used it in a few projects (use the latest branch) and am happy with it for postgres or sqlite usage.

See https://github.com/lelanthran/libsqldb/blob/v1.0.0-rc2/src/s... for example usage, but the basic premise is:

1. Send parameterised string to DB.

2. Get back records one at a time as an array of strings (NULLs are empty strings, as are empty strings) no matter the datatype of the column.