Programming Ecto

Introduction

For as long as there have been databases, there have been programmers writing libraries to access those databases in a more friendly way.

Which is a nice way of saying that they’ve been trying to avoid writing SQL.

SQL is powerful—there’s a reason it’s stuck around as long as it has—but generating it manually is tedious and error-prone. Developers have addressed this problem by creating libraries that wrap up the low-level vagaries of talking to a database into an API that’s more harmonious with the language being used. In Java, we had Hibernate. In Python, SQLAlchemy. In Ruby, ActiveRecord and DataMapper. And now in Elixir, we have Ecto.

Ecto is a large library, and even with its excellent documentation, it can be hard to know ...