When using Sequelize to manipulate your database from a JavaScript application, there might be cases where you want to just execute a raw SQL query instead of using Sequelize Model methods.
By default the function will return two arguments – a results array, and an object containing metadata (such as amount of affected rows, etc). Note that since this is a raw query, the metadata are dialect specific. Some dialects return the metadata “within” the results object (as properties on an array). However, two arguments will always be returned, but for MSSQL and MySQL it will be two references to the same object.
const [results, metadata] = await sequelize.query(“UPDATE users SET y = 42 WHERE x = 12”);
// Results will be an empty array and metadata will contain the number of affected rows.
In cases where you don’t need to access the metadata you can pass in a query type to tell sequelize how to format the results. For example, for a simple select query you could do:
const { QueryTypes } = require('sequelize');
const users = await sequelize.query("SELECT * FROM users", { type: QueryTypes.SELECT });
// We didn't need to destructure the result here - the results were returned directly.A second option is the model. If you pass a model the returned data will be instances of that model.
// Callee is the model definition. This allows you to easily map a query to a predefined model
const projects = await sequelize.query('SELECT * FROM projects', {
model: Projects,
mapToModel: true // pass true here if you have any mapped fields
});