TETerr_·Aug 5, 2026
Not to be confused with the Elixir ORM.
(https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto)
In Anyone who installed ecto 5.0.1 should consider that environment compromisedelixir-ecto
ecto
Elixir2013–2026
elixir-ecto / ecto
ecto
A toolkit for data mapping and language integrated query.
33Distinct people
34Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A toolkit for data mapping and language integrated query.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- phoenixframework/phoenix · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- elixir-lang/elixir · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- elixir-plug/plug · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year34 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-12-06 23:17:39 UTC to 2026-08-05 21:15:38 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
34 sourcesYou would have a process handling the calls to the postgres.
That process has as local state the database connection and receive messages that are translated to SQL queries, here 2 scenarios are possible:
1) The query is invalid (you are trying to inert a row with a missing foreign key, or wrong data type).
In that case, you send the error back to the caller.
2) There is a network problem between your application and the database (might be temporary).
You just let the process crash (local state is lost), the supervisor restarts it, the restarted process tries to connect back to the database (new local state). If it still fails it will crash again and the supervisor might decide to notify other parts of the application of the problem. If the network issue was temporary, the restart succeeds.
Before crashing, you notified the caller that th
Read the rest
ere was a problem and he should retry.
Now, for the caller. You could start a transient process in a dynamic supervisor for every query. That would handle the retry mechanism. The "querier process" would quit only on success and send the result back as a message. When receiving an error, it would crash and then be restarted by the supervisor for the retry.
There are plenty of other solutions, and in Elixir you have "ecto" that handles all of this for you. "ecto" is not an ORM, but rather a data-mapper: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
Context: Ecto [1] seems to be a database layer for Elixir and Elixir is a programming language for Erlang’s virtual machine.
[1] https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In Putting a full power search engine in EctoI find it quite readable especially with nested logic. Here is an example:
https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/blob/master/lib/ecto/que...
Edit: Just remembered another use case where function overload is used to override default implementation
defmodule Downloader do
use GenServer
def handle_cast(:start, state) do
...
end
def handle_cast(:stop, state) do
...
end
end
Here, "use GenServer" imports default implementation of various handlers which can be overridden.
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/main/lib/elixir/l...
In Unpacking Elixir: SyntaxEcto: A toolkit for data mapping and language integrated query
2 points · Open discussionTo me this looks a lot like ecto https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
Is there a significant difference?
In Sketch of a Post-ORMMay I ask why CouchDB though? Is it for the offline support?
Phoenix comes with its own database tool called Ecto[0] which is excellent, and it uses Postgres by default. If you're not intended to leverage CouchDB for offline support you should go Postgres without a second thought.
That said, I'm also curious about how to implement offline support with Phoenix in a nice and trivial way.
[0] https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In Ask HN: Is my software stack choice sound?Phoenix apps don't typically use Mnesia; they use a relational database through Ecto [1].
[1]: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In I'm all-in on server-side SQLiteEcto the database driver for Phoenix is probably the most amazing piece of software I've used. Elegant dx, performant and just enough of an abstraction on SQL.
[1]: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?I've used my share of data access libraries and patterns (e.g. hibernate, activerecord, ecto, ...). The only time I've been happy is when I use raw SQL for non-dynamic SQL and a lightweight query builder for everything else.
I feel like I always run into some thing that at best isn't intuitive to express/read and at worse, cannot be expressed. If I remember correctly, when I was learning Elixir/Ecto, https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/issues/1616 issue and the lack of lateral join support caused me issues.
Want to create a user?
"insert into users (id, name, status) values ($1, $2, $3)"
Our query builder takes pretty raw SQL fragments:
q = Query.new()
|> Query.select("u.id, u.name")
|> Query.from("users u")
|> Query.from("join authentications a using (id)")
q = case params[:status] do
nil -> q
status -> Que
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ry.where(q, "u.status", :eq, status)
end
rows = Query.rows!(q)
Looking through the docs, in Ecto, that join would be:
|> join(:inner, [u], a in Authentiction, on: u.id == a.id)
Which I find needlessly abstract.
(I will admit that if you really do need to support multiple databases, the abstraction is useful).
I see this criticism a lot but I don't think it has anything to do with macros specifically and more so to do with lack of familiarity with Elixir. I've felt the same way about Django being magic because I had trouble following the class hierarchy. It makes a lot more sense now because I'm more familiar with Python and Django. But even today I'll be looking deeper at something and ask WTF it's doing. In that respect, Elixir codebases are easier to me. The module depth seems "shallower" and I don't have to disambiguate between what behavior is caused by class inheritance or an imported function.
When I first tried to use Elixir several years ago Ecto.Schema [0] seemed complex and magical, but then I came to realize it's just converting module attributes to runtime code. There is not really that much complex macro logic going on.
>This also
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leads to cryptic errors where you get an error in non existant lines of code.
When was the last time you used Elixir? This isn't a problem I can recall having in the last 4 years or so of using Elixir.
>following the control flow in Phoenix is like a maze because of all the macro substitutions.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? A specific case as to where this happened for you would help. Phoenix's use of macros is actually pretty light [1] except for some very low level stuff. You can even see how frequently a developer will use macros in Phoenix by searching `__using__` in the codebase [2]. It's not used as much as people think. The majority is for views and controllers and only to provide a very thin layer of support on top of your regular use of code. As an example, the "macro magic" in Phoenix.Controller is just handling some basics for giving a layout and view to Plug and handling fallback actions for exceptions. You could do the plug calls manually and I think it would be safe to not use any macros in your controller code.
Another familiarity issue with the language (and any language really) is understanding what is meaningful in a stack trace and what isn't. And the likely cause of the error in the first place. Is it syntax? Is it mistyping a variable? Is a function just used improperly? (wtf is init_p_do_apply and why does it show up in every stacktrace?) You're juggling all these different issues - learning a new paradigm, a new syntax, not knowing how to extend things. It's obviously going to be a little overwhelming and, if not strictly required, we might just pick a different language that we're more familiar with.
[0]: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/blob/master/lib/ecto/sch...
[1]: https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com/blob/master/li... (not mine, I just go here to show the most frequent use of macros in Phoenix)
[2]: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/search?q=__using...
> SQL doesn't compose all that well.
On that topic, I really enjoy working in Elixir because Ecto [1] lets you write "SQL" with Elixir's composable functional syntax. It sits somewhere between "the language is compiled to SQL" and ORM. The Ruby-esque syntax took some getting used to, but once I was past that hurdle my productivity skyrocketed. It's not 100% feature complete compatibility with all the different SQL dialects, but most of what you'll need is there.
[1] https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In ClickHouse as an alternative to Elasticsearch for log storage and analysisFor web applications, Phoenix is very popular: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix; it uses some OTP directly and its dependencies like the web-server Cowboy use it as well.
DB development usually uses Ecto: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto, it has OTP servers for connection pooling and other tasks.
For managing background tasks I use Honeydew: https://github.com/koudelka/honeydew
In A Brief Guide to OTP in ElixirI think Ecto has the best of both worlds (a useful abstraction over SQL and is low level enough) and the right approach:
"Ecto is a toolkit for data mapping and language integrated query for Elixir."
https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
In How to use Query Objects to refactor Rails SQL-queriesLong ago I liked ActiveRecord(AR), then I worked at a company that did large aggregations in SQL and found it to be severely limited in working with complex queries which use many JOIN statement and sub-queries. During that time I came to enjoy working with the Sequel[0] gem, and its fantastic documentation. Now, after working with Ecto[1] in Elixir, I've found that the ROM[2] builder pattern is a better approach to abstracting SQL and mapping the results to Ruby objects. It's much cleaner and more maintainable than a long mess of AR queries.
Ryan Bigg wrote a great book about breaking away from AR in Rails called Exploding Rails[3]. It's a good read.
[0] http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/
[1] https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto
[2] https://rom-rb.org/5.0/learn/introduction/active-record/
[3] https://leanpub.com/explodingrails
In Choosing Ruby on Rails for web development project in 2019Showing the 15 most recent of 34 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.