Ecto is commonly used to interact with databases, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL via Ecto.Adapters.SQL (source code). Ecto is also commonly used to map data from any source into Elixir structs, whether they are backed by a database or not.

See the getting started guide and the online documentation for more information. Other resources available are:

• Programming Ecto, by Darin Wilson and Eric Meadows-Jönsson, which guides you from fundamentals up to advanced concepts

• The Little Ecto Cookbook, a free ebook by Dashbit, which is a curation of the existing Ecto guides with some extra contents

This is the beginning of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! Reading this tutorial should be one of your first steps in learning Erlang, so let's talk about it a bit.
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First of all, I began growing the idea of writing this after reading Miran Lipovača's Learn You a Haskell for great Good! (LYAH) tutorial; I thought he did a great job making the language attractive and the learning experience friendly. As I already knew him, I asked him how he felt about me writing an Erlang version of his book. He liked the idea, being somewhat interested in Erlang.

So here I am typing this. Of course there were other sources to my motivation: I mainly find the entry to the language to be hard (the web has sparse documentation and otherwise you need to buy books), and I thought the community would benefit from a LYAH-like guide. Less importantly, I've seen people attributing Erlang too much or not enough merit sometimes based on sweeping generalizations. Then there are people who sure as hell believe Erlang is nothing but hype. If I'd like to convince them otherwise, I know they're not likely to read this in the first place.

This book thus wants itself to be a way to learn Erlang for people who have basic knowledge of programming in imperative languages (such as C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc) and may or may not know functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, OCaml...). I also want to write this book in a honest manner, selling Erlang for what it is, acknowledging its weaknesses and strengths.

Partisan is a scalable and flexible, TCP-based membership system and distribution layer for the BEAM. It bypasses the use of Distributed Erlang for manual connection management via TCP, and has several pluggable backends for different deployment scenarios.

Partisan is a runtime system that enables greater scalability and reduced latency for distributed actor applications.

• Partisan improves scalability by allowing the application developer to specialize the overlay network to the application’s communication patterns.
• Partisan achieves lower latency by leveraging several predominately automatic optimizations that result in the efficient scheduling of messages.
• Bring Your Own Overlay - Partisan exposes an API for users to implement their own overlays; application developers must simply implement the membership_strategy interface for handling messages. Partisan automatically uses this membership strategy for processing incoming and outgoing messages to the system – the application developer only needs to handle internal state transitions and supplying the system with an updated list of members. Partisan automatically sets up required connections, serializes and deserializes messages, performs failure detection, and message forwarding. This makes it possible to implement protocols with very little code; our implementation of the full-mesh membership protocol is 152 LOC.
• Partisan is the first distributed actor system to expose this level of control to the application developer, improving the performance of existing actor application and enabling new types of actor applications.