Northwind Elixir Traders

Learn Elixir and database modeling with Ecto and SQLite, all in one project

by Isaak Tsalicoglou

Built for the curious, this isn’t your average programming book—it’s nearly 500 pages of hands-on mentorship beyond coding, fusing core skills in Elixir, Ecto, and SQLite with business experience and R&D tenacity. Think of it as a $500 course distilled into one powerhouse resource, with tons of learning-by-doing, in a single project. Acquire hard skills in Elixir and database modeling with Ecto’s migrations, changesets, and more, re-imagining a classic database that millions around the world have used before for learning. By fearlessly ditching the “happy path”, this immersive, exploratory, memorable, project-based tutorial helps you confidently tackle real-world projects with Elixir and Ecto.

This work was written and produced entirely by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

Built for the curious, Northwind Elixir Traders isn’t your typical programming tutorial. This immersive, project-based adventure reimagines the classic Northwind database, guiding you through Ecto’s migrations, changesets, and queries to model data with real-world edge. Ditching the “happy path,” it’s one ambitious journey—crafting a schema step by step, wrestling with SQLite’s quirks, and automating bulk imports, all while sharpening Elixir skills via side-quests like refactoring and systematic problem-solving. Drawing from the author’s R&D and B2B equipment-trading experience, it’s nearly 500 pages of hands-on mentorship—think Elixir gym crossed with an engineer’s playground.

You’ll transform an Entity Relationship Diagram into code, tame messy data, and unearth insights with queries both simple and complex. It’s not about exhausting Ecto’s every nook; it’s about grokking the essentials through practice, fearless experimentation, and diving into docs when things don’t work according to intuition or expectation. SQLite spices up the challenge, but the skills you’ll build also apply to working with PostgreSQL. Sprinkled with mini-essays from the author’s experience, it builds a gritty mindset to confidently tackle real-world projects—no copy-paste prayers needed. For Elixir newcomers, database dabblers, or those looking to build the data foundation of their Phoenix LiveView app, this is a speed-run in upskilling, wrapped in an enjoyable and unforgettable exploration.

On your choice of computing platform, you’ll need Elixir 1.18+, the sqlite3 binary, and basic terminal skills.

Source code

Errata

Releases:

• P1.0 2025/05/14

• Before we begin
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The application and the repo excerpt
• Chapter 2: Creating the database schema
• Chapter 3: Refining the table schema
• Chapter 4: Introducing constraints
• Chapter 5: Changesets in modules with schemas
• Chapter 6: Uniqueness constraints
• Chapter 7: Basic table associations
• Chapter 8: Associations with Ecto.Schema
• Chapter 9: Casting and putting associations
• Chapter 10: Importing data from a dynamic repository excerpt
• Chapter 11: Modeling further tables, and data cleansing
• Chapter 12: Modeling a join table
• Chapter 13: Cleaning up excerpt
• Chapter 14: Insights from data with queries
• Chapter 15: More and more-advanced queries
• Chapter 16: Very complicated window queries
• Chapter 17: Towards “Northwind Elixir Traders 2.0”