That's an interesting point that I should perhaps have covered in the original article.

The real code that this is based on is in fact hidden behind a GenServer for this exact reason -- to maintain the expectations of other Elixir code that has to interact with it. The advantage of the escape hatch, as another commenter mentions, is allowing efficient sparse mutations of a large chunk of data, without having to pay a copy penalty every time. I definitely wouldn't recommend sharing the db handle widely.