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Ruby

ORM in Ruby on Rails

If Jason Seifer , Maciej Czuchnowski or any other RoR experts has a moment, I’d appreciate your thoughts on ORM in rails. I’m used to normalizing SQL databases as much as possible, but will this potentially slow a web apps performance? I’m building a fairly simple site and I already have 20+ models just from the many-many relationships (mostly using has_many :through)…seems too much and I want to cut it down.

Is it better to use single table inheritance as much as possible? STI works for very similar objects but otherwise it tends to create blank cells in SQL tables (ie an instance doesn’t actually have all of the attributes represented by the table’s columns).

I found this article on Multi-table inheritance by using XOR – would this be a good solution?

Thanks in advance

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

I'm very flattered although I would not call myself an expert at all :). I edited your post to tag Jason properly, now he should notice the tag and hopefully he will be able to help you.

Thanks Maciej! I appreciate the humility...but any ideas? I've started organizing classes into modules...this helps a little.

thanks again,

Brian