Ask HN: How can I learn "advanced" data modelling for Rails? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I learn "advanced" data modelling for Rails?

25 pointsrman66623 comments

I'm a beginner (hobbyist) Rails developer. I've gone through many of the available tutorials, such as Michael Hartl's excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial at http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ (both editions, books, and screencasts). I can build and understand simple CRUD-type applications with associations with no problems.

Now, I want to "scratch my own itch" and build an application I can actually use in my work. Basically, it will need to be able to keep track of tasks and comments arranged as projects and project templates. I'm running into difficulty designing these models and associations because they are more complex. I'm sure I could find or buy an application to do this, but I'd really like to learn how to do it myself, instead.

Question: Are there techniques or resources (books, tutorials, articles) or forums where I can learn to design more complex models and associations? This doesn't seem like it's specific to Rails (to me). Should I be researching database techniques, models, associations, for example, to get ideas?

I love Rails, but I strongly disagree with its philosophy of the DB as being just a dumb data store. Two things I would recommend.

One, the book Enterprise Rails. It's a few years old, so all the examples are from Rails 2, but the meat of it is about proper database design, including the stuff that Rails doesn't believe in (composite primary keys, foreign key constraints, check constraints, triggers). Chapter 4, about the importance of data integrity, was probably the single most useful thing I've read about web development in the past few years.

Most of it is on Google Books (although sadly, chunks of chapter 4 are missing): http://books.google.com/books?id=thTju-4duY4C&printsec=f...

Second, the best thing I did was replace ActiveRecord with Sequel. Sequel has built-in support for all of those things that ActiveRecord doesn't (I couldn't live without its composite primary key support), and is in general a much more robust library than ActiveRecord. It also supports more exotic SQL features like CTEs and CASE statements without forcing you to drop down to writing raw SQL (though you can certainly do that if you want).

It's not a necessary upgrade for everyone. If your app has fairly simple models and relationships, ActiveRecord will probably be just fine for you. But if you want to get better with SQL and get closer to your DB, I think Sequel is a much better choice.

More info on Sequel: http://sequel.rubyforge.org/

It also integrates very well with Postgres - there's a C extension for the Sequel postgres adapter (https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_pg) and support for adding common triggers in migrations, counter columns and whatnot (https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel_postgresql_triggers). It also supports the more exotic datatypes - hstore, arrays, even the json and range types that are coming in PG 9.2.

This is overkill for someone looking to grow into intermediate relational database concepts.

That's nice to hear, I guess. I play with a lot of this stuff and still feel intermediate.

What would you describe as intermediate relational database concepts?

Based on what the OP says he wants to build, I'd say things like joins, the out of the box many-to-many functionality, etc. Basically, how do you link your models together in a sane way. No need for ORM replacement. Just good SQL fundamental knowledge.

http://sql.learncodethehardway.org/book/ would be a good start.

From CMU's Application Design and Development course which uses rails:

Sample projects with good comments: https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12 (project management app the professor created) https://github.com/profh/PATS_67272

Slides from the class: http://rook.hss.cmu.edu/~67272/schedule.php

ಠ_ಠ This pattern is everywhere... https://github.com/profh/arbeit-S12/blob/master/app/models/a...

but it's readable, right?

Scary o_O

Wow! That's a super awesome resource. Thank you!

SQL For Web Nerds is a terrific resource for learning SQL. http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

If your data model is built on top of an RDBMS, learning how one works is the best first step to designing good data models!

Excellent resource. Thanks!

I totally get what you mean. When I started with Rails I felt the same way. First I've completed some tutorials and read Agile Development With Rails but at that time i could only build "standard" applications - I couldn't think out of the box.

That happens probably because you don't yet understand much Ruby and how Rails use it to do all its "magic". My suggestion is that you keep trying. But here are some tips:

Learn more Ruby; watch every episode of Railscasts; dive into the source code (even if you don't undertand it); read open source apps on Github like Spree; build as many apps as you possibly can;

Thanks, marcelojnk. Looking at Spree now.

Difficult to know what you mean specifically by "advanced" relations.

Might be worth looking at SQL itself first so that you understand what goes on inside the ORM.

Get comfortable doing join , inner join , outer join etc across multiple tables.

Thank you. After reviewing a few of the answers, I realize this (better understanding of RDBMS) is where I need to focus.

I went through a similar growth curve of being a total beginner to full-time Rails developer.

For tips: there's a lot of power in has_many :through. Watch the relevant Railscasts on has_many through and the Rails docs.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-ha...

has_many :through handles the minority of complex data relationships, but it gets used a lot and is a great starting place and can probably be helpful immediately in your projects/tasks/comments app

Thank you joshcrews. I will look into this right away. Sounds useful.

This might be overkill for you, but at a certain point I just set down for a few days and read The Rails 3 Way front to cover. It's a reference of sorts and it's very complete (afaik). I marked all the things I hadn't known or thought was interesting and made a point of using then right away. It was really dry at times but turned out to be well worth it.

http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Edition-Addison-Wesley-Professio...

The following links might be of help:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/355-hacking-with-arel

http://railscasts.com/episodes/354-squeel

http://railscasts.com/episodes/215-advanced-queries-in-rails...

UPDATE from RMAN666 (who posted this question): Thank you all for the suggestions and comments. I've already learned a lot from them and it's only been two hours! I need to learn more about RDBMS and Rails' association commands. The links you provided will really help. I now realize this is probably more of an intermediate topic than an advanced topic :-)

Learn SQL beyond simple statements. For instance, did you know that you can write this in SQL: "SELECT * FROM marketing_promotions WHERE 201205 BETWEEN month_from AND month_to" ? There are a lot of interesting things you can do with SQL which Rails isn't necessarily provide a good API into. For instance, did you know that you can create a custom crafted join view at the database level, with a sophisticated where clause, then instruct ActiveRecord to treat it as a real table? (This by the way sounds like what you need to do for your particular problem.) Also have a look into SQL subqueries, they are a very powerful tool.

Thank you Toshio!

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