Articles on postgresql
Rails Database Best Practices
Working on an oldish Rails project, I came across some smelly ActiveRecord code that begged for some refactoring love. I also spent some time speeding up pages with slow/many database calls. Between those two experiences, I felt the inspiration to write-up some “Back to Basics” Rails Database Best Practices. Rule #1: Let your Database do …
Adventures in Searching with Postgres: Part 2
In part one, we looked at querying 100,000 International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) code records for 3-7 character codes. In part two of three, we’ll cover full-text search of the record descriptions using Postgres and Arel.
Adventures in Searching with Postgres: Part 1
For a recent project, we built a live-search for over 60,000 records which used both simple pattern matching and full-text search. The records we needed to search were diagnoses that are used to assign patients to a therapy. I had never done full-text search or anything real-time with that many records, so I ended up …
PostgreSQL: Aggregates, Medians, and a Brief Command Reference
Recently, I have been working with analytics in PostgreSQL. Often I hit the database through Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord ORM. But with the tens of millions of rows I needed to crunch for analytics, I achieved significantly better performance and clearer code by writing raw SQL. Here’s a compilation of things I learned or used …