Best way to copy a table using ActiveRecord

Rails
1

Hey guys,
I’m trying to copy the entire content of table “actives” to the table
“olds”. What I’ve done in the past is use regular SQL statements, but
I’d like to make my code more Ruby-ish I suppose. Using SQL, I would
usually run a DELETE FROM olds to clear that table, then iterate over
everything in the actives table and copy it over to the olds table. Is
there a better way to do this, especially now that I’m using
ActiveRecord?

Thanks!

  • Jeff
2

Seriously,
The best way to ahieve this is in a stored procedure in the database.

Just create a method on your model class that will run the stored proc,
that way your controllers and rake tasks etc… can have access to the
functionality if you want them to
.
Let the database do the job it’s designed to do and let your models do
their bit, you will get a much better performance.

3

Jeff M. wrote:

Hey guys,
I’m trying to copy the entire content of table “actives” to the table
“olds”.
[…]

Why are you bothering? If this is simply a question of filtering
inactive records, you probably should just have a flag for that.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]