Workshop: Essential Slick: Hands On With Slick 3

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This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the latest version of Typesafe's relational database library, Slick. The session aims to demystify Slick, providing both a guide to the basics and a deep dive into the major concepts. It is aimed at intermediate Scala developers, but assumes no prior knowledge of any version of Slick.

Slick 3 is the industry standard library for accessing relational databases in Scala. It provides many benefits, such as a fully asynchronous interface and strong compile-time type-checking, but comes with a cost in terms of complexity. Many experienced Scala developers have difficulty becoming productive with Slick, and beginners often find it to be a significant hurdle.

The session will be divided roughly into four sections:

1. Getting Started - You will run through the basics of setting up a project and creating a database layer using the Cake pattern. You will define some data tables, configure a database connection, and run some simple queries to test everything is working.

2. Queries - You will take a close look at Slick's query DSL, including the relationships between tables, columns, and queries. You'll discuss how to filter, project, and join queries to retrieve the desired results.

3. Actions - You will look at sequencing queries using Slick's Action monad. You will start with simple cases such as running queries one after the other, and proceed to more complex call graphs involving interleaved SQL and Scala code.

4. Tips and Tricks - You will finish with a set of tips for effective use of Slick, including structuring application code, modelling primary keys, mapping custom data types, and debugging errors at compile and run time.

Code and setup instructions are available in this Github repo.

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