has_metadata

Keep your tables narrow

Wide tables are a problem for big databases. If your ActiveRecord models have 10, maybe 15 columns, some of which are VARCHARs or maybe even TEXTs, it's going to slow your queries down when you start to scale up.

The easy solution to this problem is to limit your projections; in other words, to only SELECT the columns that you actually need. If you've got a users table with a giant about_me text column, and you're only trying to look up the user's login, then just select the login column.

In the long run, though, a superior solution is to just move those about_me-type columns to a completely different table. This table has just one JSON-serialized field, making it schemaless, so it doesn't waste space. Each row in this table is associated with a record in another table (Metadata has_one of your models).

This way, when your website gets huge, all of your giant, freeform data is in one table that you can shard, or move off to an alternate database, or even a NoSQL-type document store, or otherwise manage as you please. Your relational tables remain slim and efficient, containing only columns that a) are indexed, or b) you need frequent access to.

This gem includes a generator that creates the Metadata model, and a module that you can include in your models to define which fields have been spun off to the metadata record.

Important Note: This gem is only compatible with Ruby 1.9+ and Rails 3.0+.

Firstly, add the gem to your Rails project's Gemfile:

gem 'has_metadata'

Next, run the generator, which will add the Metadata model and its migration to your application.

rails generate metadata

The first thing to think about is what columns to keep in your model. You will need to keep any indexed columns, or any columns you perform lookups or other SQL queries with. You should also keep any frequently accessed columns, especially if they are small (integers or booleans). Good candidates for the metadata table are the TEXT- and VARCHAR-type columns that you only need to render a page or two in your app.

You'll need to change your model's schema so that it has a metadata_id column that will associate the model with its Metadata instance:

t.belongs_to :metadata

Next, include the HasMetadata module in your model, and call the has_metadata method to define the schema of your metadata. You can get more information in the {HasMetadata::ClassMethods#has_metadata} documentation, but for starters, here's a basic example:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include HasMetadata
  has_metadata({
    about_me: { type: String, length: { maximum: 512 } },
    birthdate: { type: Date, presence: true },
    zipcode: { type: Number, numericality: { greater_than: 9999, less_than: 10_000} }
  })
end

As you can see, you pass field names mapped to a hash. The hash describes the validation that will be performed, and is in the same format as a call to validates. In addition to the EachValidator keys shown above, you can also pass a type key, to constrain the Ruby type that can be assigned to the field.

Each of these fields (in this case, about_me, birthdate, and zipcode) can be accessed and set as first_level methods on an instance of your model:

user.about_me #=> "I was born in 1982 in Aberdeen. My father was a carpenter from..."

... and thus, used as part of form_for fields:

form_for user do |f|
  f.text_area :about_me, rows: 5, cols: 80
end

The only thing you can't do is use these fields in a query, obviously. You can't do something like User.where(zipcode: 90210), because that column doesn't exist on the users table.