DEV Community

Daniel Kukula
Daniel Kukula

Posted on

TIL: Non standard postgres types in livebook

#elixir #livebook #postgres

Livebook has a new, nice feature that allows you to connect to a database. It works with basic data types.

livebook screenshot

But I found a problem when the data type is not supported by postgrex.
livebook screenshot
In this case, you can either have to write a custom postgrex extension like the example here. In postgrex GitHub repo, there are many examples for common data types, but XML is missing there.

You can also cast your field to a supported data type:

SELECT demographics::text from person.person
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

livebook screenshot
To play with this example, you can install the example Adventureworks database provided by Microsoft. I made an elixir converter that converts some of the files to a format accepted by PostgreSQL, and also updated the previous version to properly name the columns with underscores.

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
thbar profile image
Thibaut Barrère •

I met the same situation and ultimately I converted the smart cell for the connection into code, added the types: DB.PostgrexTypes, and earlier defined them with

Postgrex.Types.define(DB.PostgrexTypes, [Geo.PostGIS.Extension], [])
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Thanks for your post which put me on track!

Read next

endykaufman profile image

Adding the Postgres database to the project and running migrations via Flyway for the NestJS-mod application

ILshat Khamitov -

vitorbrangioni profile image

Effective Real-Time Database Monitoring with Supabase and PostgreSQL: A Guide to Minimizing Overhead and Managing I/O

Vitor Braggion -

adriens profile image

🦆 💏 🐘 Let PostgreSQL & duckdb "sql" together

adriens -

nsrez profile image

Dockerize NEXTJS and Setup Drizzle ORM with PostgreSQL locally with docker in NEXT.JS...

NsrEZ -