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I was recently learning Ecto - Elixir's DB integration library - and its design, to my untrained eyes, looked very similar to SQLAlchemy. Especially the way of

I was recently learning Ecto - Elixir's DB integration library - and its design, to my untrained eyes, looked very similar to SQLAlchemy. Especially the way of writing queries looked almost identical. I never actually used either, just read a bunch of tutorials for both, so I'd be happy to hear an informed opinion: is the similarity superficial, or is Ecto modeled after SQLAlchemy? Or do they both implement a pattern which predates them both?

madelyn 6y ago
You can use SQLAlchemy like Ecto or in a functional manner, especially with core. But a lot of projects I've seen around the web try to bend the sqlalchemy ORM into a more "active record" way of working.
bitwalker 6y ago
I believe Ecto is largely inspired by LINQ from C#, but I wouldn't be surprised if SQLAlchemy was an inspiration as well.
lawik 6y ago
I dare say that Ecto does a lot of things quite differently. From my work with SQLAlchemy I never saw anything similar to changesets. I love working with Elixir but I would probably say that I found building queries in SQLAlchemy a bit more straight-forward than in Ecto. While I'd rather do basically everything else in Ecto. I think most of the similarities is because they are both providing abstraction on top SQL, which tends to lead to a similar enough API surface. I don't know what primarily influenced Ecto. But I think it was quite intentionally not Django ORM or ActiveRecord. Working with Ecto and SQLAlchemy at different times I don't find them very similar beyond all the SQL terminology and API surface they share. So yeah, maybe superficial, and yes an older pattern, SQL ;) SQLAlchemy + Alembic cover a very large feature set for ORM, query building, migrations and all of that stuff in a way I think works pretty darn well. It simplifies building SQL queries piece by piece but gets very complex for certain queries.

madelyn 6y ago

You can use SQLAlchemy like Ecto or in a functional manner, especially with core. But a lot of projects I've seen around the web try to bend the sqlalchemy ORM into a more "active record" way of working.

bitwalker 6y ago

I believe Ecto is largely inspired by LINQ from C#, but I wouldn't be surprised if SQLAlchemy was an inspiration as well.

lawik 6y ago

I dare say that Ecto does a lot of things quite differently. From my work with SQLAlchemy I never saw anything similar to changesets. I love working with Elixir but I would probably say that I found building queries in SQLAlchemy a bit more straight-forward than in Ecto. While I'd rather do basically everything else in Ecto. I think most of the similarities is because they are both providing abstraction on top SQL, which tends to lead to a similar enough API surface. I don't know what primarily influenced Ecto. But I think it was quite intentionally not Django ORM or ActiveRecord. Working with Ecto and SQLAlchemy at different times I don't find them very similar beyond all the SQL terminology and API surface they share. So yeah, maybe superficial, and yes an older pattern, SQL ;) SQLAlchemy + Alembic cover a very large feature set for ORM, query building, migrations and all of that stuff in a way I think works pretty darn well. It simplifies building SQL queries piece by piece but gets very complex for certain queries.