ANN: Sequel 3.23.0 Released

Ruby
1

Sequel is a lightweight database access toolkit for Ruby.

  • Sequel provides thread safety, connection pooling and a concise
    DSL for constructing SQL queries and table schemas.
  • Sequel includes a comprehensive ORM layer for mapping records to
    Ruby objects and handling associated records.
  • Sequel supports advanced database features such as prepared
    statements, bound variables, stored procedures, savepoints,
    two-phase commit, transaction isolation, master/slave
    configurations, and database sharding.
  • Sequel currently has adapters for ADO, Amalgalite, DataObjects,
    DB2, DBI, Firebird, Informix, JDBC, MySQL, Mysql2, ODBC, OpenBase,
    Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, Swift, and TinyTDS.

Sequel 3.23.0 has been released and should be available on the gem
mirrors.

= New Features

  • Sequel now allows dynamic customization for eager loading.
    Previously, the parameters for eager loading were fixed at
    association creation time. Now, they can be modified at query
    time. To dynamically modify an eager load, you use a hash with
    the proc as the value. For example, if you have this code:

    Artist.eager(:albums)

    And you only want to eagerly load albums where the id is greater
    than or equal to some number provided by the user, you do:

    min = params[:min].to_i
    Artist.eager(:albums=>proc{|ds| ds.where{id > min}})

    This also works when eager loading via eager_graph:

    Artist.eager_graph(:albums=>proc{|ds| ds.where{id > min}})

    For eager_graph, the dataset is the dataset to graph into the
    current dataset, and filtering it will result in an SQL query
    that joins to a subquery.

    You can also use dynamic customization while cascading to also
    eagerly load dependent associations, by making the hash value
    a single entry hash with a proc key and the value being the
    dependent associations to eagerly load. For example, if you want
    to eagerly load tracks for those albums:

    Artist.eager(:albums=>{proc{|ds| ds.where{id > min}}=>:tracks})

  • Sequel also now allows dynamic customization for regular
    association loading. Previously, this was possible by using the
    association’s dataset:

    albums = artist.albums_dataset.filter{id > min}

    However, then there was no handling of caching, callbacks, or
    reciprocals. For example:

    albums.each{|album| album.artist}

    Would issue one query per album to get the artist, because the
    reciprocal association was not set. Now you can provide a
    block to the association method:

    albums = artist.albums{|ds| ds.filter{id > min}}

    This block is called with the dataset used to retrieve the
    associated objects, and should return a modified version of that
    dataset.

    Note that ruby 1.8.6 doesn’t allow blocks to take block arguments,
    so you have to pass the block as a separate proc argument to the
    association method if you are still using 1.8.6.

  • Sequel now supports filtering by associations. This wasn’t
    previously supported as filtering is a dataset level feature and
    associations are a model level feature, and datasets do not depend
    on models. Now, model datasets have the ability to filter by
    associations. For example, to get all albums for a given artist,
    you could do:

    artist = Artist[1]
    Album.filter(:artist=>artist)

    Since the above can also be accomplished with:

    artist.albums

    this may not seem like a big improvement, but it allows you to
    filter on multiple associations simultaneously:

    Album.filter(:artist=>artist, :publisher=>publisher)

    For simple many_to_one associations, the above is just a simpler
    way to do:

    Album.filter(:artist_id=>artist.id, :publisher_id=>publisher.id)

    Sequel supports this for all association types, including
    many_to_many and many_through_many, where a subquery is used, and
    it also works when composite key associations are used:

    Album.filter(:artist=>artist, :tags=>tag)

    This will give you the albums for that artist that are also tagged
    with that tag. To provide multiple values for the same
    association, mostly useful for many_to_many associations, you can
    either use separate filter calls or specify the conditions as an
    array:

    Album.filter(:tags=>tag1).filter(:tags=>tag2)
    Album.filter([[:tags, tag1], [:tags, tag2]])

  • A columns_introspection extension has been added that makes
    datasets attempt to guess their columns in some cases instead of
    issuing a database query. This can improve performance in cases
    where the columns are needed implicitly, such as graphing. After
    loading the extension, you can enable the support for specific
    datasets by extending them with Sequel::ColumnIntrospection. To
    enable introspection for all datasets, use:

    Sequel::Dataset.introspect_all_columns

  • A serialization_modification_detection plugin has been added.
    Previously, Sequel could not detect modifications made to
    serialized objects. It could detect modification if you assigned
    a new value:

    model.hash_column = model.hash_column.merge(:foo=>:bar)

    but not if you just modified the object directly:

    model.hash_columns[:foo] = :bar

    With this plugin, such modifications can be detected, at a
    potentially significant performance cost.

= Other Improvements

  • When using a migration directory containing both older integer
    migrations and newer timestamp migrations, where some integer
    migrations have not been applied, make sure to apply the remaining
    integer migrations before the timestamp migrations. Previously,
    they could be applied out of order due to a lexicographic sort
    being used instead of a numeric sort.

  • If a model does not select all columns from its table, the
    insert_select optimization is no longer used. Previously,
    creating a new model object for such a model could result in the
    object containing columns that the model does not select.

  • You can now use :select=>[] as an option for many_to_many
    associations to select all columns from both the associated
    table and the join table. Previously, this raised an error and
    required you do :select=>‘*’.lit as a workaround. The default
    remains to select all columns in the associated table and none
    from the join table.

  • The xml_serializer plugin now handles namespaced models by
    using __ instead of / as the namespace separator. Previously, /
    was used and caused problems as it is not valid XML.

  • The :eager_grapher association option can now accept a proc that
    takes a single hash of options instead of a fixed 3 arguments.
    This is the recommended way going forward of writing custom
    :eager_graphers, and all of the internal ones have been converted.
    The previous way of using 3 arguments is still supported.

  • A bug in the identity_map plugin for many_to_one associations
    without full association reflection information has been fixed.

  • Sequel is now using GitHub Issues for issue tracking. Old issues
    have been migrated from Google Code.

= Backwards Compatibility

  • The filter by associations support breaks backward compatibilty for
    users who previously added an sql_literal instance method to
    Sequel::Model. Usually, that was done to for reasons similar to
    but inferior than the filter by association support. The following
    code can be used as a temporary workaround until you can modify
    your program to use the new filter by associations support:

    Sequel::Model::Associations::DatasetMethods.
    send(:remove_method, :complex_expression_sql)

  • The private Sequel::Model#_load_associated_objects method now takes
    an additional, optional options hash. Plugins that override that
    method need to be modified.

Thanks,
Jeremy