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Eager Loading (revised)

#22 Eager Loading (revised)

Mar 20, 2013 | 7 minutes | Performance, Active Record
One way to improve performance is to reduce the number of database queries through eager loading. Here I demonstrate this and compare the difference between the "includes" and "joins" methods.
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Florian Görlitz 2 months ago

good episode. But what about delegate? Where is the differnence to your:

ruby 
def category_name
  read_attribute("category_name") || category.name
end

Thank you

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Lee Jarvis 2 months ago

Using delegate :name, :to => :category, :prefix => 'category' would simply do category.name rather than read the loaded/cached category_name attribute. AFAIK

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Ashley Connor 2 months ago

Off topic but how do you get SQL syntax highlighting when using tail?

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Greg Silcox 2 months ago

I went through many of the original RailsCasts about a year ago. They where are a great way to refresh on the basics, but rails has changed so much that it would be difficult for a new rails hopeful, such as my son, to make some of them work. Thanks for giving us a fresh, back-to-basics episode.

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Dom about 1 month ago

I agree. They are they a good reminder for optimization techniques and what has been deprecated as we move move into new Rails versions.

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Yossi S 2 months ago

Great episode! But I was hoping you'd touch eager loading with polymorphic associations. I couldn't find good information about it, and I feel it's a common problem.

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Weddingful 2 months ago

The way I approached eager loading with polymorphic associations is to define the relationship as non-polymorphic for the types of polymorphic you need to eager load. Only works for cases where your eager loading is of the same type.

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Yossi S 2 months ago

Yeah, but thats exactly what I wanted to avoid doing. My model is this message board:

A User has FeedItems. Each feed item is polymorphically related to one other model object e.g. TextPost, Picture, File, SpreadSheet and many more, via FeedItem's postable polymorphic property

So the problem here is with FeedItem: When showing User's FeedItems, I want to do something like:

ruby 
@feed_items = current_user.feed_items.includes(:postable)

But since postable is polymorphic, i cant and i get the n+1 problem...

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Andrei Stoicescu about 1 month ago

By using includes there, the polymorphic association is loaded in the best possible way (meaning that first it runs a query to load the feed items, and then, judging by the id/types it does a query for each type, and not for each instance, which from my point of view it's the best possible way to do it)

I had a more difficult problem posted here where I wanted to do an includes on the polymorphic model to eager-load other associated models, but ended up doing a manual sweep

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Yossi S about 1 month ago

You are totally correct, it really does what you said, which is the best solution. But I too share your problem: TextPost and Picture have comments (which I'd like to eagerly load), and SpreadSheet has collaborators, which I'd also like to eagerly load.

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Bharat Ruparel 2 months ago

+1 for eager loading with polymorphic associations. A very common and real problem that should be addressed in a Pro episode. Thanks.

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