[subbu]

I struggled with Ecto. It seemed too complex. I missed find_by_sql and the scopes of ActiveRecord. But once I went past the initial learning curve Ecto is a seriously well designed library. I have not written a single sql query by hand. Now I feel find_by_sql is an anti-pattern as I was mixing sql with ORM.

Once your database becomes sufficiently complex you start writing a lot more sql.

ActiveRecord's way of chaining scopes to combine multiple scopes is brittle. You can't customize the conditions. Ecto solves this by giving you composability. You can build on top of your earlier commands. If you combine this with pattern matching in the functions or Enum.reduce you have an extremely powerful and a flexible query engine.

Ecto also relies on the strengths of underlying database engine rather than treating it as a black box. If you are dealing with 100s of tables Rails way of polymorphic design doesn't give you referential integrity. I like Ecto's recommendations: https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/polymorphic-associations-with-many-t...