I’ve decided to merge http://charlesmaxwood.com with http://railscoach.com. The efforts on both sites seem to run in parallel with one site providing audio content in the podcast and the other providing content in test.

I feel like I can then focus all of the great stuff I’m doing on this one blog. This provides you a one stop shop and allows me to use this great layout created by Brandon Buttars.

Please feel free to give me feedback on this change.

Also, if you’re consuming the RSS feed, you may need to switch over to use the RailsCoach feed as I’m going to merge the feeds as well.

I started reading ActiveRecord::Base a few days ago and found 8 things that I didn’t know about that it offered. I also only made it about 1/4 of the way through the code. Here are a few new things I’ve learned upon further reading:

1. Find by multiple ids

Not only can you find a single record by calling find_by_id, you can find multiple records by providing an array of ids.

User.find_by_id([1, 12, 55])
# Returns 3 User objects with ids of 1, 12, and 55. If any isn't found, then RecordNotFound is raised.

2. Locking database records

If you have multiple processes that may update the same record (like incrementing a counter), then you may run into a problem where they both pull the record when the counter = 42. They each update the counter to 43 and save the record. This results in a deviation from reality of 1.

The solution is to lock the record while updating it. Here’s the code: Read More

activerecord, data, Database, development, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails

I’ve been trying to read more code lately and figured that I’d be best served by reading code I use frequently. Here are some notes of things I gathered from reading the ActiveRecord base.rb file.
Read More

activerecord, api rails base query attributes