Hi.. I am having a bit of ecto-phobia.. if this term catches on, please send royalties my way… I have used rails in the past and played with ActiveRecord and now moving into Ecto for my Elixir projects. I have no doubts that the Ecto API is solid but I have always feel like I might be painting my…

I haven’t had problems with things like changing column names when using Ecto- a migration and a change to the schema and I’m good to go[^1]. [^1] : As others have pointed out, renaming columns isn’t quite as simple as that, but that’s not a problem Ecto makes any worse.

Cool - yeah, I have been doing more reading this afternoon and I was aware of those things, its probably just more of a personal “issue” of mine :slight_smile:

Less about Ecto but database design of a complex systems is a tough task overall. Modifying tables (e.g. adding, renaming, indexing columns) can get messy when you’re in the millions of rows :smile: I also always have the anxiety, that little 10% of my mind thinking “what if I had designed this all …

I think the issue with “ORMs” in general is that they will always be less flexible vs underline store so you always end up with a mix of direct queries and ORM code. When it is up to me I’d rather use DB directly :slight_smile:

Database schemas evolve as applications evolve, new tables, new columns, new constraints, drops, renames… That is normal and to be expected. But think that if the schema changes, you’ll need to edit the code no matter what. Either Ecto, or hard-coded SQL, or stored procedures that depend on it. Non…

And just come at the point from a different direction: renaming columns is a good habit to get out of. As your application grows that type of operation becomes one that is difficult to deploy with zero downtime since the application code will All have to change the instant the column name is changed…

[image] brightball: And just come at the point from a different direction: renaming columns is a good habit to get out of. No disagreement here, but the original question seemed to ask if something about Ecto made doing so harder than it otherwise might be. I don’t think Ecto does.

Agreed. Just wanted to address while the topic was there. :slight_smile:

It’s a subproduct of relying on ORMs vs RDBMS features if you rely on views or sps your application would not care about changes to to underlying schema

[image] fxn: using Elixir code that is more understandable most of the times because of the higher-level API it is expressed in I just want to say, that there is the other side to that. If you learn how to read SQL and write performant SQL, then you can use it anywhere. But if you rely on ORM…