Ecto.ULID Next

An Ecto.Type implementation of ULID.

Ecto.ULID should be compatible anywhere that Ecto.UUID is supported. It has been confirmed to work with PostgreSQL and MySQL on Ecto ~> 3.2.

ULID is a 128-bit universally unique lexicographically sortable identifier. ULID is binary-compatible with UUID, so it can be stored in a uuid column in a database.

This is a fork of TheRealReal/ecto-ulid, which doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. The aim is to ensure compatibility with current and future Ecto versions.

Features

• Generate ULID in Base32 or binary format.
• Generate ULID for a given timestamp.
• Autogenerate ULID when used as a primary key.
• Supports reading and writing ULID in a database backed by its native uuid type (no database extensions required).
• Supports Ecto ~> 3.2.
• Supports the officially supported Elixir versions (currently ~> 1.10).
• Confirmed working on PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Optimized for high throughput.

Performance

Since one use case of ULID is to handle a large volume of events, Ecto.ULID is optimized to be as fast as possible. It borrows techniques from Ecto.UUID to achieve sub-microsecond times for most operations.

A benchmark suite is included. Download the repository and run mix run bench/ulid_bench.exs to test the performance on your system.

Usage

Usage is very similar to Ecto.UUID. The following example shows how to use Ecto.ULID as a primary key in a database table, but it can be used for other columns just as easily.

API documentation is available on hexdocs.

Install

Install ecto_ulid_next from Hex by adding it to the dependencies in mix.exs:

defp deps do
  [{:ecto_ulid_next, "~> 1.0.0"}]
end

Migration

Since ULID is binary-compatible with UUID, the migrations look the same for both types. Use :binary_id when defining a column in a migration:

create table(:events, primary_key: false) do
  add :id, :binary_id, null: false, primary_key: true
  # more columns ...
end

Alternatively, if you plan to use ULID as the primary key type for all of your tables, you can set migration_primary_key when configuring your Repo:

config :my_app, MyApp.Repo, migration_primary_key: [name: :id, type: :binary_id]

In this case, you do not need to specify the id column in your migrations:

create table(:events) do
  # more columns ...
end

Schema

When defining a model's schema, use Ecto.ULID as the @primary_key or @foreign_key_type as appropriate for your schema. Here's an example of using both:

defmodule MyApp.Event do
  use Ecto.Schema

  @primary_key {:id, Ecto.ULID, autogenerate: false}
  @foreign_key_type Ecto.ULID

  schema "events" do
    # more columns ...
  end
end

Ecto.ULID supports autogenerate: true as well as autogenerate: false when used as the primary key.

Application Usage

A ULID can be generated in string or binary format by calling generate/0 or bingenerate/0. This can be useful when generating ULIDs to send to external systems:

iex> Ecto.ULID.generate()
"01BZ13RV29T5S8HV45EDNC748P"

iex> Ecto.ULID.bingenerate()
<<1, 95, 194, 60, 108, 73, 209, 114, 136, 236, 133, 115, 106, 195, 145, 22>>

To backfill old data, it may be helpful to pass a timestamp to generate/1 or bingenerate/1. See the API documentation for more details.