Snow Giraffe Tech

Today I present Taking Active Record To the Next Level at the MySQL Conference and Expo! There is a lot of excitement in the Rails world due to Rails 3 merge with Merb which will provide framework agnosticism for the people. However, good, old, (sometimes not playing nice with MySQL) ActiveRecord is still the defacto [...]

The ar-extensions plugin extends ActiveRecord to help developers scale, optimize, and customize Rails interaction with the database. New ar-extensions is the ability to fine tune queries by specifying MySQL database options from ActiveRecord find and save methods.

The ar-extensions plugin, which extends ActiveRecord to help optimize interaction between Rails and the database, now provides support for MySQL INSERT SELECT functionality.

By default Rails uses int(11) as the standard for primary key (id) columns. MySQL prefers unsigned numeric types. Plugin mysql_migration_optimize supports unsigned integers, column display width and complete control over the primary key. Also explained is how to use different numeric types such as tinyint and bigint with Rails Migrations.

Although plugins exist to force :select and :include to play nice with ActiveRecord::Base.find, using this approach does not always yield the best performance. The post discusses when to use eager loading and when to use other approaches and the plugins that will help you.

Static Record Cache permanently caches active record data for classes which contain small amounts of static data.

eload-select plugin. Allowing :select to play nice with :include for Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord finders.

One of the many database features hated by Rails is enumerated columns. Even if you add them to your migration by dirtying your hands with SQL yourself, then the schemadumper interprets them as zero length strings as mentioned in Rob Sanheim’s blog. Funtime!
I however like enumerated columns because they save space and are pretty, and [...]

Add folders to your Amazon S3 buckets

Changing column data to use MySQL functions instead of the actual column data for Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord is simple. To allow ActiveRecord to retrieve the data of the function,  alias it to the column name.
Event.find :all, :select => ’substring(name, 1, 10) as name’
This produces the follow SQL query using MySQL SUBSTRING function:
select substring(name, 1, [...]