April 18, 2024

"Saga of a Gnarly Report" with Owen and Dan

50 minutes

In today's episode, Elixir Wizards Owen and Dan delve into the complexities of building advanced reporting features within software applications. They share personal insights and challenges encountered while developing reporting solutions for user-generated data, leveraging both Elixir/Phoenix and Ruby on Rails.

The discussion zeroes in on crucial data modeling and architectural decisions that enhance reporting efficiency and flexibility. Owen and Dan explore tactics like materialized views, event sourcing, and database triggers to optimize data handling while being mindful of UX elements like progress indicators and background job management.

They share insights on leveraging the Elixir/Beam ecosystem’s strengths—like concurrency and streamlined deployment—to tackle common reporting, caching, and integration challenges. The episode highlights the impact of reporting features across all aspects of a software application’s design and architecture.

Key topics discussed in this episode:

Reporting on assessment data, survey results, and user metrics

Differences between reporting and performance/error monitoring

Implementing reporting in Elixir/Phoenix vs. Ruby on Rails

Displaying reports in web, printable, PDF, SVG, and CSV formats

Challenges of generating PDFs for large data sets

Streaming CSV data directly to the client

Handling long-running report generation tasks

Providing progress indicators and user notifications

Strategies for canceling or abandoning incomplete reports

Tradeoffs of pre-calculating report data vs. real-time generation

Materializing views and denormalizing data for reporting

Exploring event sourcing patterns for reporting needs

Using database triggers and stored procedures for reporting

Balancing data structure optimization for reports vs. day-to-day usage

Caching report data for faster retrieval and rendering

Charting and visualization integration in reporting systems

Links mentioned:

Prometheus monitoring system & time series database https://prometheus.io/

Thinking Elixir "FLAME with Chris McCord" https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/181

Phoenix LiveView Uploads https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/file_uploads.html

https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_live_view/Phoenix.LiveView.UploadWriter.html

Postgrex PostgreSQL driver for Elixir https://hexdocs.pm/postgrex/Postgrex.html

Ecto https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html

Heroku cloud application platform https://www.heroku.com/

Elixir Wizards S9E12 Marcelo Dominguez on Command and Query Responsibility Segregation https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s9-e12-marcelo-dominguez-cqrs/

Commanded Elixir CQRS/ES applications https://github.com/commanded/commanded

Tailwind CSS Framework https://github.com/tailwindlabs

Memcached https://memcached.org/

Redis https://redis.io/

Oban https://hexdocs.pm/oban/Oban.html

ETS https://hexdocs.pm/ets/ETS.html

Capistrano remote server automation and deployment tool https://capistranorb.com/

...more

View all episodes

By SmartLogic LLC

4.9

2222 ratings