Programming Ecto

Breaking Up the Artist Schema

To see how we can make our schemas more flexible, let’s consider our artists table. In the most abstract sense, an artist is an entity that produces albums. The simplest representation could be something like this:

• name
• birth_date
• death_date

This looks great for a database table but it would make for a poor UI. If we consider real-world data, we realize that different types of artists exist: bands (The Beatles, Imagine Dragons, King Crimson), and individuals (Imogen Heap, Bob Dylan, Ariana Grande).

For individuals, we’d probably want at least three name fields (we need to handle Sia as well as John Cougar Mellencamp), but bands need just one. The date fields we have here make sense for individuals, but it doesn’t ...