# Help with Code Tweaking

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-code-tweaking/164625>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 3, 2009, 12:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-code-tweaking/164625 "2009-04-03T12:01:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![wanyixue](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/958977/32.png) [@wanyixue](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wanyixue)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2009, 12:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-code-tweaking/164625/1 "2009-04-03T12:01:50Z")

</div>

scenario : select distinct years from members and their respective  
record count of that particular year.

eg: [{year = 2008 , count = 45123},{year = 2007 , count = 12332}]

previously , i was using “select distinct tochar(datetime)” , it ended  
up taking quite a while to fetch the records so i switched to this code.

relationship group 1 : N members

rootgroup is a pretched group

member = root\_group.members.find(:all,  
:select =\> “max(datetime) as maxdate,min(datetime) as mindate”  
)[0]

return member.mindate.year.upto(member.maxdate.year).inject({}) do  
|year|

```
          #return hash with year and member count for that year

          compare_date = Date.new(year,1,1)

          {year , root_group.members.find(
           :conditions => [ "datetime >= ? AND datetime < ?",
                             compare_date,
                             compare_date + 1.year ],
                            :select => 'count(*)')}
       end

```

any ideas on how to tweak it ?

it really looks quite clumsy at the moment  
and iam repeating the code for drilling into the months and days ,  
it really feels like bad practice.

thanks

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![wanyixue](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/958977/32.png) [@wanyixue](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wanyixue)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2009, 7:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-code-tweaking/164625/2 "2009-04-03T19:03:23Z")

</div>

Why not use something like this:

=# select count(\*), date\_part(‘minute’, created\_at) as min from toys  
group by min;  
count | min  
-------±----  
4008 | 36  
5239 | 37  
4496 | 38  
(3 rows)

Replacing “date\_part” with whatever date function your database  
supports to return the year. In my example I used minutes only  
because all the data was created at the same time.

Worth benchmarking at least.