Rails - Apr 2006 - Delaying table attribute load using ActiveRecord

Hi all,

I came accross the following problem lately: I got a table with several 
BLOB fields (Oracle DB) and I have ActiveRecord reading those fields 
whenever records are loaded using finder methods. This behavior is just 
fine in 99.9% of the time, but considering BLOB data is not small, it is 
considerably slowing down search access :(.

So basically, I thought about building a :has_one relationship and add 
an extra table table holding BLOB value so as to cope with the pb. I 
found it painfull and not very ''RoRy'', so I decided to hack 
ActiveRecord::Base so as to delay the attribute load... and it works. 
Attributes are dynamicaly loaded whenever client application accesses 
them explicitely.

Syntax looks like the following:

class A < ActiveRecord::Base
  delay_attributes :foo, :bar
...
end

Now I got two questions:
 - as I am new Rails (and Ruby as well): I am wondering if I am missing 
something concerning ActiveRecord usage (meaning this hack is useless),
 - if this patch is a good idea, I''d like to submit it to the 
maintainers of the project, but I don''t know hat is the exact procedure
to do so.

Thx

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On 4/2/06, Laurent Lecigne <llecigne@free.fr>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I came accross the following problem lately: I got a table with several
> BLOB fields (Oracle DB) and I have ActiveRecord reading those fields
> whenever records are loaded using finder methods. This behavior is just
> fine in 99.9% of the time, but considering BLOB data is not small, it is
> considerably slowing down search access :(.
>
> So basically, I thought about building a :has_one relationship and add
> an extra table table holding BLOB value so as to cope with the pb. I
> found it painfull and not very ''RoRy'', so I decided to
hack
> ActiveRecord::Base so as to delay the attribute load... and it works.
> Attributes are dynamicaly loaded whenever client application accesses
> them explicitely.
>
> Syntax looks like the following:
>
> class A < ActiveRecord::Base
>   delay_attributes :foo, :bar
> ...
> end
>
> Now I got two questions:
>  - as I am new Rails (and Ruby as well): I am wondering if I am missing
> something concerning ActiveRecord usage (meaning this hack is useless),
>  - if this patch is a good idea, I''d like to submit it to the
> maintainers of the project, but I don''t know hat is the exact
procedure
> to do so.
>
> Thx
>
You can use the new scoped finders with the :select option to prevent
ActiveRecord from pulling in the BLOB column.  You could then make a
separate accessor method to grab the BLOB when you need it.

Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
> On 4/2/06, Laurent Lecigne <llecigne@free.fr> wrote:
>> found it painfull and not very ''RoRy'', so I decided
to hack
>>
>> Now I got two questions:
>>  - as I am new Rails (and Ruby as well): I am wondering if I am missing
>> something concerning ActiveRecord usage (meaning this hack is useless),
>>  - if this patch is a good idea, I''d like to submit it to the
>> maintainers of the project, but I don''t know hat is the exact
procedure
>> to do so.
>>
>> Thx
>>
> 
> You can use the new scoped finders with the :select option to prevent
> ActiveRecord from pulling in the BLOB column.  You could then make a
> separate accessor method to grab the BLOB when you need it.
Thanks for your quick and accurate answer :)

I guess you are right, scoped finders can do the job pretty well. 
However, I have still to specify the scope in every calls to the 
repository (could be error prone) and take care of some accessor (even 
if it is no big deal though). While scoped finders mainly dynamically 
adapt queries given the runtime context (for security purpose mainly), 
delaying some table attribute load is rather a static behavior, non 
context oriented and a good workaround for coping with large columns 
slow access.
As my application is not very big now, I''ll try to use both approaches 
to see whether it is still a good idea to have ActiveRecord::Base 
patched or not (which sucks a lot cause I have to scratch my head every 
time activerecord is released!).


-- 
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