In joe's "Big changes to Erlang"
http://joearms.github.io/2014/02/01/big-changes-to-erlang.html
"we wanted maps to be a replacement for records and to be as efficient as records, and its not blindingly obvious how to do so."
How to make transform records to maps in mnesia?
Mnesia uses ETS (and dets) internally and these are based on tuples as the base data structure. While they can contain maps at the top-level it must be tuples. As records are tuples records can also be at the top-level. Redesigning ets/dets/mnesia to use maps would be a major effort.
As maps access is done dynamically while records statically it is probably not possible to get maps as fast as records.