Taking ActiveRecord to the Next Level

While the Ruby on Rails is great to get you up and running in minutes, performance modifications are necessary to scale to the next level. By leveraging several simple techniques, one can expand ActiveRecord, the Rails implementation of object-relational mapping (ORM), to realize vast improvements in the database layer.

For the first part of the talk, I will discuss how and when one would want to use MySql features which are not included with the default ActiveRecord implementation. While many of these features are very simple to add by either getting your hands wet with SQL or by using an ActiveRecord extension plugin, and they can drastically improve the code quality as well as jump-start the ORM performance of a rails application.

• ON DUPLICATE UPDATE
• IGNORE
• INSERT SELECT
• INSERT (multiple values)
• UNION
• USING (specifying indices)

Other general techniques and tricks to enhance and reduce the number of queries generated by Rails will be discussed as well as any existing related rails gems and plugins one can leverage.

• selecting specific columns
• using eager load
• reading from a replica

Attendees should have knowledge of basic Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord, and SQL.