dogweather
Could someone speak to ActiveRecord vs. Ecto queries, especially relative date comparisons?
I’m deciding whether to write a little reporting library in Rails or Elixir+Ecto. Here’s an ad-hoc query in the Rails console:
SearchLog
.where("vip_status LIKE 'vip: yes%'")
.where('created_at > ?', 3.days.ago)
.pluck(:vip_status)
So, two questions: 
- How would I write the
LIKEand3.days.agowith Ecto? - I realize that Elixir+Ecto will be more verbose. And also probably, have a greater mental overhead due to knowing in which modules various functions are found. From your experience, is the trade-off worth it? Are there benefits of the repo pattern over active record? How does the Elixir console compare to Pry for writing ad hoc queries?
Personally, I get high productivity from the Rails console. The fluent OO API really helps.
Thanks!
Most Liked
sodapopcan
Ecto has relative date functions (including ago) and a like function. With your example it’s actually not really more verbose than AR:
from s in SearchLog,
where: like(s.vip_status, "vip: yes%"),
where: s.inserted_at > ago(3, "day"),
select: %{vip_status: s.vip_status}
(I wrote that on the fly so sorry if there is an error)
I obviously don’t know anything about the lib you want to write, but in my experience having done lots of reporting with Rails, you end up writing a bunch of raw SQL, so Ecto would likely be a better overall experience (I have yet to do any reporting with Ecto).
The console is a bit more of a pain out of the box, but that can be remedied with a good .iex.exs. Alias all the stuff you use regularly and require Ecto.Query (or even import it if you’re feeling saucy).
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