Building a Custom Analytics System with Ecto and Elixir

In this article, José Valim discusses the need and implementation of a custom analytics system for the Dashbit website, aiming to avoid user tracking through cookies. He details the use of Ecto upserts to minimize database load by only updating access counters daily. The system leverages Elixir processes to handle database writes asynchronously and in batches, ensuring resilience against traffic spikes. To dynamically spawn and manage these processes for different pages, the solution integrates Elixir's Registry and a dynamic supervisor. The article provides code snippets and explanations for setting up the schema, migration, upsert operations, and process management, with considerations for scalability and effective use of Elixir's features.