Storing Data Using Numerical Representation

Numerical representation is a great way to store a set of boolean values in a single database column. Lets say that you have a user that has multiple roles. We want to…

Fuzzy Matching in PostgreSQL with Nicknames

If you have had the LIKE comparison in SQL leave you wanting, this post is for you. The reason I say this is because LIKE is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the…

Another Helping of Abstraction, Please

Rails 3.1 is soon to be released, and with it comes two new abstraction libraries – CoffeeScript, and S(ass)CSS. These libraries are used to generate Javascript code,…

Taking the Magic Out of ActiveRecord – Speed up that Query!

Rails, and other programming frameworks that include an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) make is really easy to not worry about your database. That is until your…

Bringing the Dead Back to Life

No, not zombies. A few days ago, a friend of mine brought me a computer and told me that it was running REALLY slow. I did some investigation, and quickly discovered…

ActiveRecord’s Secret find_by_sql Results

Well, its not exactly a secret. It sure isn’t well documented however. Recently, I wanted to return a query that spanned multiple database tables. I decided to go with…