Agreed, on all points, and that's basically what I do usually. I typically have a gen_server with a behavior defined data access and update message API, then th

Agreed, on all points, and that's basically what I do usually. I typically have a gen_server with a behavior defined data access and update message API, then that gen_server is the only process that can access a Mnesia table. I've seen a lot of code that doesn't do that though, and you still need to debug the gen_server if something goes wrong. If you use the gen_server approach though it is much easier to debug.