This obscure little feature in Ecto/Elixir is something we’ve been using at Slab.com for about a year. While the blog post only covers the feature itself, I wanted to give a better overview of WHY we’re using it.
Slab is a multi-tenant Phoenix app where all tables in our database, including pivot tables, have an org_id foreign key that references the team the data belongs to. Using association defaults enforces that the correct org_id value is automatically set for all resources.
We combine this with an OrgRepo module that wraps around our default Repo, which can only write or read other resources with the same org_id, ensuring that data for one team has no possibility of accidentally leaking to another team (using Repo is forbidden in our codebase).
An added bonus is; when we eventually have to scale our databases via something like sharding and have to vertically partition the data based on org_id, we would already have this system in place to support us.
This is a good blog post. Thanks for writing up how you do this. It’s important for the community to have some of these more advanced use cases documented!
This obscure little feature in Ecto/Elixir is something we’ve been using at Slab.com for about a year. While the blog post only covers the feature itself, I wanted to give a better overview of WHY we’re using it.
Slab is a multi-tenant Phoenix app where all tables in our database, including pivot tables, have an
org_idforeign key that references the team the data belongs to. Using association defaults enforces that the correctorg_idvalue is automatically set for all resources.We combine this with an
OrgRepomodule that wraps around our defaultRepo, which can only write or read other resources with the sameorg_id, ensuring that data for one team has no possibility of accidentally leaking to another team (usingRepois forbidden in our codebase).An added bonus is; when we eventually have to scale our databases via something like sharding and have to vertically partition the data based on
org_id, we would already have this system in place to support us.This is a good blog post. Thanks for writing up how you do this. It’s important for the community to have some of these more advanced use cases documented!