Rails - Jun 2007 - How to do Daily Database Maintenance in a Rails Way?

I am learning Rails and came across the following problem.

I need to do some daily maintenance to the MySQL database. By
maintenance, I mean reading data from one table, do some calculation,
and put the result in another table. This should happen everyday at a
specified time, e.g., at mid-night, no matter if there is any visitor
visiting the site or not. Ideally this should happen quietly in the
background without any human intervention.

How can I do it in Rails?

I understand that in some other environments like PHP I could do it in
at least two ways:

1. Write a stored procedure for the daily maintenance;
2. Write a standalone script for the daily maintenance and use cron to
schedule it to run once per day;

But these two are pretty un-Rails. So what should I do for tasks like
this in a Rails way?

Thanks!


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When I''ve had to do this sort of thing in the past, I''ve
always created
a controller that had actions that did the maintenance. Then, in order 
to make it happen in the background, I would create a cron job that used 
wget to request that controller/action. This gives you a lot of 
flexibility.

The other option is to use script/runner and stick that in a cron job. 
Whatever floats your boat, really.

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

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I guess the Rails way is creating a rake task that depends on rails
environment (i.e. boots the Rails runtime), doing there everything you
need using ActiveRecord and then calling this rake task from cron

task :my_task => :environment
   # Do whatever you need
end

calling it:

rake my_task

Cheers,
Yuri


On 6/2/07, newbie <tao.wang.usa-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
>
> I am learning Rails and came across the following problem.
>
> I need to do some daily maintenance to the MySQL database. By
> maintenance, I mean reading data from one table, do some calculation,
> and put the result in another table. This should happen everyday at a
> specified time, e.g., at mid-night, no matter if there is any visitor
> visiting the site or not. Ideally this should happen quietly in the
> background without any human intervention.
>
> How can I do it in Rails?
>
> I understand that in some other environments like PHP I could do it in
> at least two ways:
>
> 1. Write a stored procedure for the daily maintenance;
> 2. Write a standalone script for the daily maintenance and use cron to
> schedule it to run once per day;
>
> But these two are pretty un-Rails. So what should I do for tasks like
> this in a Rails way?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> >
>

-- 
Best regards,
Yuri Leikind

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Sorry, but isn''t it ugly, using wget to trigger some logic when you
have script/runner and rake tasks? It''s like driving from NY to
Washington via LA.

Cheers,
Yuri

On 6/2/07, Bryan Duxbury
<rails-mailing-list-ARtvInVfO7ksV2N9l4h3zg@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
>
> When I''ve had to do this sort of thing in the past, I''ve
always created
> a controller that had actions that did the maintenance. Then, in order
> to make it happen in the background, I would create a cron job that used
> wget to request that controller/action. This gives you a lot of
> flexibility.
>
> The other option is to use script/runner and stick that in a cron job.
> Whatever floats your boat, really.
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
> >
>

-- 
Best regards,
Yuri Leikind

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On Jun 2, 2007, at 6:25 PM, Yuri Leikind wrote:
>
> I guess the Rails way is creating a rake task that depends on rails
> environment (i.e. boots the Rails runtime), doing there everything you
> need using ActiveRecord and then calling this rake task from cron
>
> task :my_task => :environment
>    # Do whatever you need
> end
>
> calling it:
>
> rake my_task

I think that''s a fine solution. Cron is great as scheduling, and you  
can still use your Rails environment definitions (and ActiveRecord,  
if necessary).
You may be interested in BackgrounDrb (http:// 
backgroundrb.rubyforge.org/). It is designed for offloading long- 
running tasks from your Rails server, and it includes scheduling  
capabilities (similar to cron).

Thanks,

David L Altenburg
http://gensym.org


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