I do like a lot the concept of errors as values, and the pattern match that can be done in Elixir. I’m building an Elixir app right now and I’ve reach the point where I need to interact with the database. I did configured Ecto, and everything is working alright, but I have a big question in my head regards to error handling with Ecto.

Reading Ecto documentation there is very little about error handling, and what I usually see is exceptions being throw most of the times, even on methods like Repo.one, without the exclamation, where it returns the element, nil, or in case of something else, throw an exception.

Maybe I’m trying too hard to catch all the errors, and there are some errors that are really exceptions that should be raised to an upper level? I don’t know, it just feels wrong. I would prefer to handle it, even if it’s just a log entry, and then return from the function with a {:error, ...}. For a moment I thought that the Repo.one was just an exception, but then Repo.all behaves the same.

Any tips? I’m trying to hard to catch these errors? Or Ecto is really too heavy on the exception side? What is your opinion?