Please let’s not get too hot on this topic.
I don’t think anyone is trying to annoy, or disrespect others.
There have been people integrating Neo4j…
But as mentionned by @domvas, it’s hard to fit squares in triangles, and Ecto works well for relational concepts.
It would be nice to see how other frameworks do.
Erlang is not complexer than Elixir. It is Elixir that is adding complexity with macros, DSLs and a more sophisticated syntax. Both languages are great, but it is wrong to make your statement, especially when Erlang has a very simple syntax - much simpler than most programming languages. It is just a bit unusual when you come from Ruby/Java/C…
This playing with words continues (“relation” … “relationship” - this is a forum, not a university exam - my point was quite clear after I reexplained it with examples: entities relate to each other, how else would you expect me to state it?) and … based on that I should accept someone questioning (2×) my complete career ?
Wouldn’t you read this as disrespectful?
But now my reaction is hostile? Really?
I didn’t question anyone’s competences, did I?
As my first real experience with this forum it’s quite demotivating (not to mention I don’t feel welcome)! To think that in my first post I explicitly said I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings and I suggested Neo4j only on top of RDBMS. I thought: let’s walk over eggs as I’m new here, but that clearly didn’t suffice.
I didn’t expect this subject to be so touchy.
For peace sake, I won’t react anymore regarding this matter (I’ll for now search other sources to pursue my quest).
I hope one day we can have a grown up conversation on database technology, but today there’s some short-circuit preventing us from doing so (covid19?). It’s a pity. I’ll reread my posts to see where I could have said something to contribute to this.
So for now, let’s just leave it to that, ok?
Let’s go for a nice walk and take a deep breath. But please note that I was just interested in this matter. I’m very positive regarding Elixir (and LiveView).
Let me reinforce that the Elixir community is one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
In fact, it is one of the main forces for me to have stayed with Elixir although it was tough in the beginning coming from Object Oriented languages and focusing on other databases types.
At the end of the day you always find colleagues that care about you problem and core team will always find a way to help you and make things just work.
That’s why, it’s important to stand for this issue about databases, not into an argument about “mine is bigger than yours” but the barbecue style: " I want my friends to feel welcome because even if they have different taste than me they are very important for me".
Thank you for you participation and for the way you could bring elevation to this dialogue. 
You make me feel welcome! Thanks very much.
Maybe I was a bit too fierce about defending my ideas (I seem to have a more Latin temper even though I live in Northern Europe ;-)). I don’t know.
I was very happy about finding this Elixir community to share things with.
Before that I’ve never had something like that. Only professional co-workers.
In fact this is my very first experience with an open source community.
I used to be always very suspicious about them in the past … so you can imagine the thoughts I had tonight.
Sorry if I said something (probably my 2nd last post) where I was too harsh, maybe.
Probably the side-effects of Covid-19 bit me too :-).
I’m definitely intending to try working on Elixir and use LiveView for front-end work.
I’ve been a professional developer a very long time ago, but I tasted different software engineering technologies last 10 years toying with many of them but with no full-time involvement (I had other roles but still they allowed me to get a good view on all the constraints developers are facing today, so I’m prepared now (I think ;-))).
I really consider starting up again as a full-stack developer on my own (at least at first).
If it works out well, I might drop the rest and focus on it for a living.
So being excluded from a community like this, is the last thing I was hoping for.
And if after a while I’m able to contribute I would be glad to do so.
This gives you a little bit of context about my intentions with Elixir.
Anyway thanks
Best regards
What the younger generation prefers has zero bearing on what is objectively a good technology and what isn’t. So what’s “old” and “new” has zero weight in a technical discussion.
(Example: I like and learn Rust not because I think C++ is “old” but because in my eyes it’s a lot more trouble to work reliably with. Rust being “new” is accidental; I simply find it better in the space of strong and statically typed natively compiled languages.)
I am not a scientist but I’ve read and experienced enough to see that the RDBMS model is good enough for a lot of apps. Is it inherently good for time series data? Not very much. Is it good for making an append-only journal? Hell no, the RDBMS nature of your DB will only get in the way.
But that’s not the point. The point to me is more along the lines of “people create non-RDBMS storage plugins in an RDBMS database as a way to brainstorm and see if a concept sticks and can serve practical business needs out there”.
I’d rather experiment with a new storage paradigm inside my current DB even if I full well understand that’s fitting a square peg into a round hole. I don’t care if it will perform [much] worse. I want to see if with that new storage mechanism I can write code that will be shorter, clearer to upgrade and maintain, and easier to onboard new team members in. If the goals I have for this new tech aren’t achieved then I didn’t lose much; I’ll likely just do git rm -r lib/myapp/experimental_storage/ or something, and revert a DB migration. Done.
But if I did invest in a new DB and went all the way, only the discover that it doesn’t work as well as I hoped, then that would be a huge double investment: once to migrate the current code to it, and one more time to undo all of that and get back to the “old” SQL way of doing storage.
As for your seeming disappointment that Elixir only puts the RDBMS paradigm front-and-center:
I do personally disagree that Ecto being RDBMS-centric and practical “discourages” the Elixir community to try new storage models. I don’t think so. What’s more likely is that a lot of people discovered they don’t need those new storage models, and/or simply never had the time or political capital to invest in them in their paid work.
A former employer of mine will probably be doing that in 12-24 months. A massive undertaking, just because a decision maker read a blog post and some marketing materials and went for something new based on zero technical analysis. (And I do mean 0!)
But right or wrong, Elixir would benefit a lot of having options.
I understand many options is difficult to mantain.
But options means at least 2. Right now you can only go “Relational” if you want to use the “official” Ecto that is very, very god, for…Relational DBs.
PS: if you had at least 2 options you would avoid debates about the best one and you would get more people on board. Then you could debate while using Elixir ecosystem. Now we are debating when some people are outside the ecosystem.
Disagreed. There are more storage models outside of RDBMS and graph databases – like append-only ledgers, key-value stores, time series, and many others. There will always be those unhappy that their favourite tech piece has no adapter in Elixir.
With respect, you are way too focused on how you evaluate and choose your tech. I personally know 15+ programmers who refused to do a deep dive in Elixir because they didn’t want to learn functional programming. I know at least 20 who want to but their management wouldn’t let them. And I spoke face-to-face with 6-7 who needed something very specific and niche but couldn’t spare the time to reinvent it in Elixir and thus went back to Java or C#.
Finally, I don’t see why we should strive to make Elixir more popular. It has a lot of unique and strong properties yet that doesn’t stop numerous uninformed skeptics regularly bashing it on Reddit and HackerNews. What should we do? Force them to adopt it with a gun to their head?
When you build something valuable, people will come to you. If you follow ElixirForum lately you’ll see that it should probably be renamed to LiveViewForum. 
Like half the new topics are about LiveView these days.
People should adopt a tool on their own free will and needs. Elixir has received a lot of advocacy already. If that didn’t convince some people, that’s okay.