Advanced Ruby on Rails database?

Question

Im taking on an upcoming project that involved creating and managine a large complex mysql database using RoR. It involved, many table, deep foreign keys, many to many, etc.

Anyone know a good resource (book, website, etc.) which can help me learn how to do it? I need a clearer understanding of migrations and how rails handles relational databases.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Code School have some great interactive courses such as Rails for Zombies.

Answer 2

Besides RailsCast, I would recommend RailsLab: Scaling Rails which focus on large Rails application. It seems doesn't update recently, but the post still useful, not only database, but also memory, performance etc.

Answer 3

You can check out books at the Pragmatic Programmers website. Probably one of the best options is: Agile Web Development with Rails

I also found Ruby on Rails Tutorial to be a good resource.

Also be sure to look at the Rails Guides They are well written and cover many topics in depth. For example, the migrations you mentioned and many to many associations You can even download them for offline use. Here is an answer about how to do that here

Answer 4

+1 for Railscasts.com suggestion from Trip. I've gotten a ton out of those since I moved to Ruby and Rails from ColdFusion. I also like the book "The Rails 3 Way" from Obie Fernandez. It has an extensive ActiveRecord section that is very informative both for new Rails users and is a great reference. Another solid one is "Rails 3 In Action" from Ryan BIgg and Yehuda Katz.

Answer 5

railscasts.com is great. He talks a lot about setting up your typical HABTM relations polymorphic associations, inner nestings you name it. and Bates makes it extra easy to understand.

Past that I would definately try to start off on the right food using the Metrics gem to monitor database and CPU usage. Always ensuring you're making the lightest touch on the db.