Mike Perham

Anyone who’s built a reasonably complex web site on top of a database has seen database deadlock. MySQL will throw a timeout error after waiting for 30 seconds, thereby ending the deadlock in a brutal but effective manner. Rails has a plugin, known as deadlock_retry, which will catch those errors and simply retry [...]

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DataFabric 1.2 supports ActiveRecord 2.2 and its overhauled connection handling. Believe me, this is a good thing. The old connection handling code was awful; the new code is much nicer.
How It Works
data_fabric 1.0 supported dynamic connections by proxying the connection stored in the global static connection hash. This is thread-unsafe and therefore [...]

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Justin Balthrop at Geni was nice enough to donate a few fixes to data_fabric. The major issue was that when the connection changed, the plugin established a brand new connection. With his changes, data_fabric will now cache the connection and reuse it. This can lead to a noticeable performance increase if your [...]

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I tested tracknowledge with Rails 2.2 yesterday. The main problem was with plugins: two out of the six I use failed with the same issue when used with threadsafe!
The issue is that ActiveSupport’s autoloading is turned off once threadsafe! is executed because autoloading is inherently thread-unsafe. These plugins were not explicitly requiring their [...]

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The guys at EnvyCasts gave me the opportunity to take their new screencast for a test drive. They’ve produced a 44 minute video and accompanying 118-page PDF covering all the changes in Rails 2.2. They call it “The Ultimate Guide to Rails 2.2″ but is it marketing hype, solid as a rock, or [...]

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I like Rails’s config.gem feature: it’s simple and gives you a lot of functionality for cheap, much like Rails itself.  I just spent half a day tracking down a problem because we were overusing it.
I tend to be fanatical about minimizing dependencies as it has bit me several times in the past.  In this case, [...]

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Some quick performance numbers around bulk insert of data into MySQL.  This test inserts 1000 rows into a table.  Rails 2.1.0, ar-extensions 0.8.0 and MySQL 5.0.45 on a MacBook Pro running Leopard.  I tested a number of configurations but the interesting ones are plain old iteration calling save, using ar-extensions’ import method and bare metal [...]

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I’m upgrading my Rails testbed, http://www.tracknowledge.org, with the latest and greatest.  The Rails world moves VERY quickly and staying on top of it can be challenging.  When I built it initially in April 2008, nginx + mongrel was the typical deployment model.  I stuck with Apache though since it was already installed on the machine; [...]

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Damon Clinkscales, of Austin on Rails fame, has created a one-day workshop to take your Rails skills from 0-60 in 8 hours. While this might be abysmally slow for a car, it’s a rocket sled for software engineering! I’ll be there, teaching about ActiveRecord and how to bend the database to your will. [...]

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MVC Song by Laura Balch
The FiveRuns crew have been humming this ditty under our collective breath for the last two days. Kudos to Laura for an addictive little tune!

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