Rails - Apr 2006 - Separate databases for reads and writes?

Hi all -

New to rails...  been reading as much as I can though and have yet to find 
a solid answer (although I think I found an unsolid negative).

I''m wondering if there''s a way to split up the reads and
writes in Rails
so that pages/actions that don''t need to write can query from a group
of
mirrored databases.  And my content managers can update a single master.

I know I could do it if I broke the application up into two, but that 
seems the wrong way to go about it.

So far I''ve found these two references, neither super encouraging...

http://wrath.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails-core/2005-November/000276.html
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2041

Any change since then?

Thanks!

-philip

On 4/19/06, Philip Hallstrom <rails@philip.pjkh.com>
wrote:
> I''m wondering if there''s a way to split up the reads and
writes in Rails
> so that pages/actions that don''t need to write can query from a
group of
> mirrored databases.  And my content managers can update a single master.
Just making this up as I go along, this is ugly and may not work at
all.  Inspiration
came from:
    http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoUseMultipleDatabases
    http://blogs.pragprog.com/cgi-bin/pragdave.cgi/Tech/Ruby/Connections.rdoc

Model:
    class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
      ...
    end

    class ReadModel1 < Model
      set_table_name "models"
      establish_connection ...
    end

    class ReadModel2 < Model
      set_table_name "models"
      establish_connection ...
    end

    ...

    class ReadModelN < Model
      set_table_name "models"
      establish_connection ...
    end

    class WriteModel < Model
      set_table_name "models"
      establish_connection ...
    end

Managers Controller:
    def list
      @models = WriteModel.find :all
    end

Users Controller:
    @@connections = [ReadModel1, ReadModel2, ... ReadModelN]

    def list
      read_model = @@connections[rand N]
      @models = read_model.find :all
    end

Assuming this works at all :-), an enhancement would be to store which model
class to use in the session once and reuse the same connection for the rest
of that session.