This week in Rails: Speed improvements, database comments and more!

Posted by _cha1tanya, April 23, 2016 @ 12:00 am in News

Hello everyone! Prathamesh here bringing you This Week in Rails. Let’s get started.

🏆 This week’s Rails Contributors 🏆

Thank you to 32 awesome people who contributed to Rails this week, including 5 first-timers! Want to join the party? Get started with the issues page.

🏇 String#blank? just became faster 🏇

This speed optimization will improve the performance of blank? calls against empty strings by about 3.5x. It was further improved to about 30% faster!! BOOM 💪

New Stuff

Ability to add database comments

It is possible to specify comments for tables, columns, and indexes in the database itself now with this addition. It currently works for MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters.

Improved

create_join_table works with non-integer column types

Creating a join table with create_join_table helper used to always create the columns with integer type. But now if you want to have uuid columns or any other type, it’s possible!

Fixed

Do not attempt to return connection with open transaction to pool

This fixed issues with intermittent test failures related to the Active Record connection pool trying to return connections at the wrong time.

Fix issues with inserting schema information on SQLite

Rails recently improved performance for inserting schema information using multi-row-insert. But some SQLite versions do not support the multi-row-insert feature which resulted into errors. Now Rails will gracefully handle this situation without an error.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This Week in Rails. There were many more improvements than we have room to cover here, so don’t hesitate to jump in and check them out yourself!

See you next week!