Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Changesets


Let's now analyze how can we update the information stored in the database. The way Ecto allows you to change this information may feel weird at first, since it asks you to always use a changeset that describes how the data manipulation should be accomplished. These changesets will help us to ensure the changes we are persisting are valid and don't break any of the constraints we have in place.

To understand how changesets can be helpful, let's imagine the following scenario, using an object-oriented language with an Object-Relational Mapping framework: you have a media object with dozens of fields, and you update a couple of them, then you perform a media.save and those two fields will be updated on the database row for that particular media. To compose the actual SQL update statement, the ORM needs to know how to identify the fields that changed, and issue the update statement only for those. The ORM will also do some validations for you and halt the execution of the SQL statement...