Prepared Statement on Postgresql in Rails - sql

Question

Right now I am in the middle of migrating from SQLite to Postgresql and I came across this problem. The following prepared statement works with SQLite:
id = 5
st = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.raw_connection.prepare("DELETE FROM my_table WHERE id = ?")
st.execute(id)
st.close
Unfortunately it is not working with Postgresql - it throws an exception at line 2.
I was looking for solutions and came across this:
id = 5
require 'pg'
conn = PG::Connection.open(:dbname => 'my_db_development')
conn.prepare('statement1', 'DELETE FROM my_table WHERE id = $1')
conn.exec_prepared('statement1', [ id ])
This one fails at line 3. When I print the exception like this
rescue => ex
ex contains this
{"connection":{}}
Executing the SQL in a command line works. Any idea what I am doing wrong?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you want to use prepare like that then you'll need to make a couple changes:
The PostgreSQL driver wants to see numbered placeholders ($1, $2, ...) not question marks and you need to give your prepared statement a name:
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.raw_connection.prepare('some_name', "DELETE FROM my_table WHERE id = $1")
The calling sequence is prepare followed by exec_prepared:
connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.raw_connection
connection.prepare('some_name', "DELETE FROM my_table WHERE id = $1")
st = connection.exec_prepared('some_name', [ id ])
The above approach works for me with ActiveRecord and PostgreSQL, your PG::Connection.open version should work if you're connecting properly.
Another way is to do the quoting yourself:
conn = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
conn.execute(%Q{
delete from my_table
where id = #{conn.quote(id)}
})
That's the sort of thing that ActiveRecord is usually doing behind your back.
Directly interacting with the database tends to be a bit of a mess with Rails since the Rails people don't think you should ever do it.
If you really are just trying to delete a row without interference, you could use delete:
delete()
[...]
The row is simply removed with an SQL DELETE statement on the record’s primary key, and no callbacks are executed.
So you can just say this:
MyTable.delete(id)
and you'll send a simple delete from my_tables where id = ... into the database.