Gleam PGO

A PostgreSQL database client for Gleam, based on PGO.

import gleam/pgo
import gleam/dynamic
import gleeunit/should

pub fn main() {
  // Start a database connection pool.
  // Typically you will want to create one pool for use in your program
  let db = pgo.connect(pgo.Config(
    ..pgo.default_config(),
    host: "localhost",
    database: "my_database",
    pool_size: 15,
  ))

  // An SQL statement to run. It takes one int as a parameter
  let sql = "
  select
    name, age, colour, friends
  from
    cats
  where
    id = $1"

  // This is the decoder for the value returned by the query
  let return_type = dynamic.tuple4(
    dynamic.string,
    dynamic.int,
    dynamic.string,
    dynamic.list(dynamic.string),
  )

  // Run the query against the PostgreSQL database
  // The int `1` is given as a parameter
  let assert Ok(response) =
    pgo.execute(sql, db, [pgo.int(1)], return_type)

  // And then do something with the returned results
  response.count
  |> should.equal(2)
  response.rows
  |> should.equal([
    #("Nubi", 3, "black", ["Al", "Cutlass"]),
  ])
}

Installation

gleam add gleam_pgo

Support of connection URI

Configuring a Postgres connection is done by using Config type in gleam/pgo. To facilitate connection, and to provide easy integration with the rest of the Postgres ecosystem, gleam_pgo provides handling of connection URI as defined by Postgres. Shape of connection URI is postgresql://[username:password@][host:port][/dbname][?query]. Call gleam/pgo.url_config with your connection URI, and in case it's correct against the Postgres standard, your Config will be automatically generated!

Here's an example, using envoy to read the connection URI from the environment.

import envoy
import gleam/pgo

/// Read the DATABASE_URL environment variable.
/// Generate the pgo.Config from that database URL.
/// Finally, connect to database.
pub fn read_connection_uri() -> Result(pgo.Connection, Nil) {
  use database_url <- result.try(envoy.get("DATABASE_URL"))
  use config <- result.try(pgo.url_config(database_url))
  Ok(pgo.connect(config))
}

About JSON

In Postgres, you can define a type json or jsonb. Such a type can be query in SQL, but Postgres returns it a simple string, and accepts it as a simple string! When writing or reading a JSON, you can simply use pgo.text(json.to_string(my_json)) and dynamic.string to respectively write and read them!

Rows as maps

By default, pgo will return every selected value from your query as a tuple. In case you want a different output, you can activate rows_as_maps in Config. Once activated, every returned rows will take the form of a Dict.

Atom generation

Creating a connection pool with the pgo.connect function dynamically generates an Erlang atom. Atoms are not garbage collected and only a certain number of them can exist in an Erlang VM instance, and hitting this limit will result in the VM crashing. Due to this limitation you should not dynamically open new connection pools, instead create the pools you need when your application starts and reuse them throughout the lifetime of your program.