Rails and Legacy Databases - RailsConf 2009

Rails + Legacy Databases Brian Hogan - RailsConf 2009 twitter: bphogan IRC: hoganbp

Please don’t do it!

Questions?

Just kidding.

Who’s here?

Rails and Legacy database schemas

Anything that doesn’t follow ActiveRecord conventions

This is going to be boring, isn’t it?

I bet Obie’s business panel is awesome.

or that musical patterns one...

sorry.

Simple(er) solutions with ActiveRecord

Simple problems Person singular person_id table ﬁrstname lastname name and middlename preﬁxed address city ID state zip

Simple solutions Person person_id ﬁrstname lastname middlename address city state zip

Bad Column names Person old- person_id school person_name person_email preﬁxes person_sex

alias_attribute Person person_id person_name person_email person_sex

Uglier Schemas

Really Bad Column Names Person Preﬁxes! Person id Spaces! Person Name Yikes!! Person e-mail Person sex

Use a View! Person Person id Person Name Person e-mail Person sex

Non-incrementing Keys

Try to add them.

Generate them in your code somehow.

Wordpress

Compound keys

Dr. Nic to the rescue. http://compositekeys.rubyforge.org/

Establish a connection database.yml

Establish a connection environment.rb

Wordpress

Foreign Keys are easy

Working with Legacy Data

Getting even this was a challenge!

THIS IS NOT ALL THE DATA.

Data security • Secure internal network between the database server and the mainframe • Replication to the application database server using Microsoft DTS packages • Access restricted at the table level • Access granted to primary developers via views • Access granted to third-party develpers by stored procedures.

Views are a security tool!

Views are often a performance gain!

Stored Procedures

There’s no direct support for stored procs in ActiveRecord...

...but the connection class will work!

Call a procedure

Get a return value

Get Rows

DataMapper

This is nice.

Biggest problem with Rails and Legacy is “automagical code”

DataMapper Drawbacks?

Doesn’t work well on Windows yet

No Microsoft SQL Server support.

Moving From Legacy

Where are you coming from and where are you going?

Datatypes

Oracle

Oracle NUMBER datatype is used for integers and ﬂoats

DATE is used for Time AND Date.

Oracle NUMBER and CHAR can both be used for :boolean!

Oracle Enhanced Driver • http://github.com/rsim/oracle-enhanced • Raimonds Simanovskis • Good slides on this at http://www.slideshare.net/rsim/using-ruby-on- rails-with-legacy-oracle-databases-presentation

SQL Server SQL Server 2000 and 2005 are very different.

SQL Server TEXT ﬁelds with AR are really troublesome.

SQL Server 2000-2005-sqlserver- adapter Ken Collins http://github.com/rails-sqlserver/2000-2005-adapter

Finally, watch out for triggers!

Dealing with Constraints • Avoid using ﬁxtures for tests. They’re bad news anyway • Use .new() and stubs • Duplicate validation / constraints in your code • Use exception handling • Use Stubble - http://github.com/dchelimsky/ stubble

Migrating to a new DBMS • rake db:schema:dump, and then paste that in as a new base migration • sometimes columns aren’t usable this way. Dump schema as SQL and use Regex instead to convert to Ruby.

MS SQL Databases • Tables within different databases on the same server can be joined as if they are in the same database. •

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Rails and Legacy Databases - RailsConf 2009

by Brian Hogan on May 08, 2009

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