I am trying to figure out a nice way of doing this and thought maybe there is a nicer way in the newer Rails 3.0 ActiveRecord query.
I have a bunch of Posts that have a published_at field.
Now I want to present an Archive in the sidebar with all unique months and year that contains posts and display that archive. What's the best way to do this avoiding to heavy hits on the DB on every pageload? Suggestions?
You need a query along the lines of select distinct date_format(published_at, '%m %y'), count(id) from posts group by 1. It's a trivial matter to convert this to AR syntax.
RE: pageload
Run the query for the archive and cache the result using either query caching or fragment caching.
Related
I want to display the SQL used in a count. However, Model.count.to_sql will not work because count returns a FixNum that doesn't have a to_sql method. I think the simplest solution is to do this:
Model.where(nil).to_sql.sub(/SELECT.*FROM/, "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM")
This creates the same SQL as is used in Model.count, but is it going to cause a problem further down the line? For example, if I add a complicated where clause and some joins.
Is there a better way of doing this?
You can try
Model.select("count(*) as model_count").to_sql
You may want to dip into Arel:
Model.select(Arel.star.count).to_sql
ASIDE:
I find I often want to find sub counts, so I embed the count(*) into another query:
child_counts = ChildModel.select(Arel.star.count)
.where(Model.arel_attribute(:id).eq(
ChildModel.arel_attribute(:model_id)))
Model.select(Arel.star).select(child_counts.as("child_count"))
.order(:id).limit(10).to_sql
which then gives you all the child counts for each of the models:
SELECT *,
(
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM "child_models"
WHERE "models"."id" = "child_models"."model_id"
) child_count
FROM "models"
ORDER BY "models"."id" ASC
LIMIT 10
Best of luck
UPDATE:
Not sure if you are trying to solve this in a generic way or not. Also not sure what kind of scopes you are using on your Model.
We do have a method that automatically calls a count for a query that is put into the ui layer. I found using count(:all) is more stable than the simple count, but sounds like that does not overlap your use case. Maybe you can improve your solution using the except clause that we use:
scope.except(:select, :includes, :references, :offset, :limit, :order)
.count(:all)
The where clause and the joins necessary for the where clause work just fine for us. We tend to want to keep the joins and where clause since that needs to be part of the count. While you definitely want to remove the includes (which should be removed by rails automatically in my opinion), but the references (much trickier especially in the case where it references a has_many and requires a distinct) that starts to throw a wrench in there. If you need to use references, you may be able to convert these over to a left_join.
You may want to double check the parameters that these "join" methods take. Some of them take table names and others take relation names. Later rails version have gotten better and take relation names - be sure you are looking at the docs for the right version of rails.
Also, in our case, we spend more time trying to get sub selects with more complicated relationships, we have to do some munging. Looks like we are not dealing with where clauses as much.
ref2
There exists in my database a page_history table; the idea is that whenever a record in the page table is changed, that record's old values are stored in the history table.
My job now is to find occasions in which a record was changed, and retrieve the pre- and post-conditions of that change. Specifically, I want to know when a page changed groups, and what groups were involved in the change. The query I have below can find these instances, but with the use of the min function, I can only get back the values that match between the two records:
select page_id,
original_group,
min(created2) change_date
from (select h.page_id,
h.group_id original_group,
i.group_id new_group,
h.created_dttm created1,
i.created_dttm created2
from page_history h,
page_history i
where h.page_id = i.page_id
and h.created_dttm < i.created_dttm
and h.group_id != i.group_id)
group by page_id, original_group, created1
order by page_id
When I try to get, say, any details of the second record, like new_group, I'm hit with a ORA-00979: not a GROUP BY expression error. I don't want to group by new_group, though, because that's going to destroy the logic (I think it would find records displaying times a page changed from a group to another group, regardless of any changes to other groups in between).
My question, then, is how can I modify this query, or go about writing a new one, that achieves a similar end, but with the added availability of columns that do not match between the two records? In essence, how can I find that min record without sacrificing all the other columns I'm not trying to compare? I don't exactly need a complete answer, any suggestions that point me in the right direction would be appreciated.
I use PL/SQL Developer, and it looks like version 11.2.0.2.0 of Oracle.
EDIT: I have found a solution. It's not pretty, and I'd still like to see some alternatives, but if helping me out would threaten to explode your brain, I would advise relocating to an easier question.
Without seeing your table structure it's hard to re-write the query but when you have a min function used like that it invariably seems better to put it into a separate sub select to get what you want and then compare the result of that.
I am writing a log viewer app in ASP.NET / C#. There is a report window, where it will be possible to check some information about the whole database. One kind of information there I want to display on the screen is the number of times each generator (an entity in my domain, not Firebirds sequence) appears in the table. How do I do that using COUNT ?
Do I have to :
Gather the key for each different generator
Run one query for each generator key using count
Display it somehow
Is there any way that I can do it without having to do two queries to the database? The database size can be HUGE, and having to query it "X" times where "X" is the number of generators would just suck.
I am using a Firebird database, is there any way to fetch this information from any metadata schema or there is no such thing available?
Basically, what I want is to count each occurrence of each generator in the table. Result would be something like : GENERATOR A:10 times,GENERATOR B:7 Times,Generator C:0 Times and so on.
If I understand your question correctly, it is a simple matter of using the GROUP BY clause, e.g.:
select
key,
count(*)
from generators
group by key;
Something like the query below should be sufficient (depending on your exact structure and requirements)
SELECT KEY, COUNT(*)
FROM YOUR_TABLE
GROUP BY KEY
I solved my problem using this simple Query:
SELECT GENERATOR_,count(*)
FROM EVENTSGENERAL GROUP BY GENERATOR_;
Thanks for those who helped me.
It took me 8 hours to come back and post the answer,because of the StackOverflow limitation to answer my own questions based in my reputation.
So, I have a Photo model which can be downloaded at full_size and presentation_size. When a user downloads a photo I track this on the photo's full_downloads and presentation_downloads attribute.
That's all good.
Sometimes I want to know how many total downloads there have been. I have a simple method, total_downloads which looks like so:
def total_downloads
self.full_downloads + self.presentation_downloads
end
My question is: I would like to be able to order photos by all three of these (full, presentation, total downloads). The first two are easy, but how do you do an order by the sum of two columns? Note this needs to be both SQLite and PG compatible at minimum.
A side question, would it be faster to make the total_downloads method a query, and if so what's the best way to write that? I know to sum on the class you can call Photo.sum(...), but I'm not sure how to do that for two columns on a single record.
Thanks!
You can try this:
Photo.order('full_downloads + presentation_downloads')
It will run this SQL query:
SELECT "photos".* FROM "photos" ORDER BY full_downloads + presentation_downloads
This is potentially slow though. If you have a large dataset and use this sort order often, you should consider creating a total_downloads column and recalculating its value if the record's full_downloads or presentation_downloads column changes.
Photo.order('full_downloads + presentation_downloads DESC')
That would definitely be much faster than doing the sort in Ruby.
You now might have to add Photo.order(Arel.sql('full_downloads + presentation_downloads')) to avoid UnknownAttributeReference error
I have photos which have_many comments.
I want to select whatever photos have recent comments and display those photos in a kind of "timeline" where the most recently commented photo is at the top and other photos fall below.
I tried this, and it worked on SQLite:
#photos = Photo.select('DISTINCT photos.*').joins(:comments).order('comments.created_at DESC')
However testing on PostgreSQL raises this error:
PGError: ERROR: for SELECT DISTINCT, ORDER BY expressions must appear in select list
\n: SELECT DISTINCT photos.* FROM \"photos\" INNER JOIN \"comments\" ON \...
So, the problem is, I'm selecting Photos but ordering by recency of comments... and Postgre doesn't like that.
Can anyone suggest either:
A: How I can fix this query...
or
B: A different way to retrieve photos by the recency of their comments?
The important reason I'm doing it this way instead of through the comments model is I want to show each photo once with any recent comments beside it, not show each comment by itself with the same photos appearing multiple times.
Thanks!
Check out the :touch parameter of of the belongs_to association:
:touch
If true, the associated object will be
touched (the updated_at/on attributes
set to now) when this record is either
saved or destroyed. If you specify a
symbol, that attribute will be updated
with the current time instead of the
updated_at/on attribute.
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html#method-i-belongs_to
In your Comment model, therefore, you would have:
belongs_to :photo, :touch => :comments_updated_at
Now, in order to create a time line of photos with recently updated comments all you need to do is:
Photo.order('comments_updated_at DESC').all
Just be sure to add the "comments_updated_at" datetime field to your Photo model.
Make sense?
Just for the future readers of this question, the real answer to your SQL issue in SQlite vs Postgresql is that in the SQL "standard", every selected column needs to be in the GROUP BY or be an aggregate function.
https://www.techonthenet.com/sql/group_by.php (or whatever SQL ref you want to take a look at)
Your SQLite query used SELECT * instead of specific columns. That would have blown up with a similar error on most databases like Postgresql (MySQL, Maria, probably MSSQL Server). It's definitely invalid SQL grammar for a lot of good reasons.
Under the hood, I have no clue what SQlite does -- maybe it expands the * into fields and adds them to the GROUP BY under the hood? But its not a good SQL statement which is which it threw the error.