Why does this method of connecting and sending a SQL request not work but this other one does?

The surprising part is that the one that doesn't work is from the mssql package page. Why is this one not working on my machine? What am I doing wrong here? The one that works is some example I found elsewhere online and it works great.

As a side note - do I need to asynchronously do these requests? The one that doesn't work uses async, when should I be using this?

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
const sql = require("mssql");

//Configuration for the database
const config = {
    user: 'sa',
    password: 'password',
    server: 'ipAddress', 
    database: 'DBName',
    trustServerCertificate: true, //Only setting this to true for testing on a local test server; Change to false when deploying to live
    encrypt: true,
};

app.get('/', function (req, res) {

    //THIS DOESNT WORK
     async () => {
         try {
          await sql.connect(config)
          var request = new sql.Request();
          const result = await request.query(`exec spTest null`)
          console.dir(result)
          res.send(result.recordset)
         } catch (err) {
          // ... error checks
          console.dir(err)
         }
     }

    //THIS ONE WORKS!
    // sql.connect(config, function (err) {
    
        // if (err) console.log(err);

        // // create Request object
        // var request = new sql.Request();
           
        // // query to the database and get the records
        // request.query('exec spTest null ', function (err, recordset) {
            
            // if (err) console.log(err)

            // // send records as a response
			// console.log(recordset)
            // res.send(recordset);
            
        // });
    // });
});

var server = app.listen(5000, function () {
    console.log('Server is running...');
});

The one that doesn't work makes localhost:5000 not load anything. However, the one that works successfully returns the results of the SP:

{"recordsets":[[{"SomeTimestamp":"2023-06-21T11:32:03.827Z","OtherField":""}]],"recordset":[{"SomeTimestamp":"2023-06-21T11:32:03.827Z","OtherField":""}],"output":{},"rowsAffected":[1,1]}

It seems the "non-working" code is defining async function within the request handler function and may not be "invoked" when requesting that route.

Try changing it to something like this

app.get('/', async (req, res) => {
     try {
      await sql.connect(config)
      var request = new sql.Request();
      const result = await request.query(`exec spTest null`)
      console.dir(result)
      res.send(result.recordset)
     } catch (err) {
      // ... error checks
      console.dir(err)
     }
 }