December 2007
Intermediate to advanced
357 pages
10h 48m
English
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Chapter 4. Database
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
—Joel Spolsky
For many developers, Rails starts with the database. One of the most compelling features of Rails is ActiveRecord, the object-relational mapping(ORM) layer. ActiveRecord does such a good job of hiding the gory details of SQL from the programmer that it almost seems like magic.
However, as Joel Spolsky says, all abstractions are leaky. There is no perfectly transparent ORM system, and there never will be, due to the fundamentally different nature of the object-oriented and relational models. Ignore the underlying database at your own peril.
Database Management Systems
The Rails community has been built around the MySQL database management system (DBMS[30] ) for years. However, there are still a lot of misconceptions surrounding DBMSs, especially when used with Rails. While MySQL has its place, it is certainly not the only option. In the past few years, support for other databases has vastly grown. I encourage you to keep an open mind throughout this chapter, and weigh all criteria before making a decision on a DBMS.
Rails supports many DBMSs; at the time of this writing, DB2, Firebird, FrontBase, MySQL, OpenBase, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase are supported. You will probably know if you need to use a DBMS other than the ones mentioned here. Check the RDoc for the connection adapter for any caveats specific to your DBMS; some features such as migrations are only supported ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.