Yes, same experience here. I felt (and still feel) that ActiveRecord is one of if not the best ORMs out there, but it was always a source of debugging and performance optimizations/pain, and the trick was basically taking hand-written SQL and trying to get ActiveRecord to generate that. After briefly moving to node.js full time I actually got very anti-ORM, although query building libraries all sucked too which left me unsure of what the best approach is.
Then I learned Ecto/Phoenix and this is truly the best way. Ecto is so close and translateable to raw SQL that there's little to no friction added by it, but it handles all the stuff you don't want to have to do by hand (like query building, parameterization, etc). Ecto is a real breath of fresh air and I find myself writing quick scripts that hit a database in Elixir just so I can use Ecto! I also love how easy Ecto makes it to model database tables that were originally defined by another language/framework or even by hand. Trying to do that with ActiveRecord or another ORM is usually a recipe for extreme pain, but with Ecto it's so easy.
Then I learned Ecto/Phoenix and this is truly the best way. Ecto is so close and translateable to raw SQL that there's little to no friction added by it, but it handles all the stuff you don't want to have to do by hand (like query building, parameterization, etc). Ecto is a real breath of fresh air and I find myself writing quick scripts that hit a database in Elixir just so I can use Ecto! I also love how easy Ecto makes it to model database tables that were originally defined by another language/framework or even by hand. Trying to do that with ActiveRecord or another ORM is usually a recipe for extreme pain, but with Ecto it's so easy.