15 minute talk given at Red Dirt Ruby Conf in Oklahoma City - May 6th

1. Active Record Makeover
Marty Haught
@mghaught
http://martyhaught.com

2. Boulder Ruby
Longmont, Colorado

3. ActiveRecord feels like

4. Growing tired of this

5. Wished I was driving...

6. ...but I can’t
• Existing system
• Project already committed

7. or doesn’t make sense
• Not the best fit for project
• No significant gain
• rdbms solves the problem

8. So where’s the love?
• Where’s the new hotness
• Envious of the nosql gems
• Want a better way to model data

9. Rails 3’s ActiveRecord
Unpimp your auto

10. Engine’s been rebuilt
• ActiveRelation
• arel gem - relational algebra
• Consistency under the hood

11. Easier to model with
• Simpler api
• Fully chainable
• Lazy loaded

12. find all
Rails 2x
Rails 3

13. first, last, count
Rails 2x
Rails 3

14. Finder methods

15. Chainable
Rails 2x
Rails 3

16. What about scopes?
Rails 2x
Rails 3

17. Reusing scopes

18. Merging scopes

19. Using scoped

20. Mix and match

21. Behaves like the model
new
create delete
create! delete_all
find update
destroy update_all
destroy_all exists?

22. Building with where values

23. Lazy loaded
• won’t interact with the db until accessed
• such as each, map, etc.
• force load - all, first, last

24. Plays nice with caching

25. Modeling with class

26. to_sql

27. where_values

28. Extend the possibilities
• ActiveRecord::QueryMethods opens a door
• invokes to_sql on where_values unless a String
• pass in your own objects that create sql

29. MetaSearch & MetaWhere
Ernie Miller
http://github.com/ernie/meta_where
http://github.com/ernie/meta_search

30. Got some hotness
• new engine
• concise and readable
• simpler to model
• flexible
• extendable

31. Go have fun, get dirty

32. Thank you
Marty Haught
@mghaught
mghaught@gmail.com
http://martyhaught.com
Image Credits
wagon - http://www.flickr.com/photos/halfy/3410561333
vw car - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgEvy60bZYI
white race car - http://www.flickr.com/photos/33031095@N03/4538638400/
yellow sports car - http://www.flickr.com/photos/retinafunk/57699167/
red sports car - http://www.flickr.com/photos/freefoto/3844246045/
gray sports car - http://www.flickr.com/photos/doramosnoopy/2479741916/
blue sports car - http://www.flickr.com/photos/chorwedel/4398697300/
racing cars - http://www.flickr.com/photos/oizumi/2582189751/