Separate databases for reads and writes?

Rails
1

Hi all -

New to rails… been reading as much as I can though and have yet to
find
a solid answer (although I think I found an unsolid negative).

I’m wondering if there’s a way to split up the reads and writes in Rails
so that pages/actions that don’t need to write can query from a group of
mirrored databases. And my content managers can update a single master.

I know I could do it if I broke the application up into two, but that
seems the wrong way to go about it.

So far I’ve found these two references, neither super encouraging…

http://wrath.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails-core/2005-November/000276.html
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2041

Any change since then?

Thanks!

-philip

2

On 4/19/06, Philip H. [email protected] wrote:

I’m wondering if there’s a way to split up the reads and writes in Rails
so that pages/actions that don’t need to write can query from a group of
mirrored databases. And my content managers can update a single master.

Just making this up as I go along, this is ugly and may not work at
all. Inspiration
came from:
Peak Obsession
http://blogs.pragprog.com/cgi-bin/pragdave.cgi/Tech/Ruby/Connections.rdoc

Model:
class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
…
end

class ReadModel1 < Model
  set_table_name "models"
  establish_connection ...
end

class ReadModel2 < Model
  set_table_name "models"
  establish_connection ...
end

...

class ReadModelN < Model
  set_table_name "models"
  establish_connection ...
end

class WriteModel < Model
  set_table_name "models"
  establish_connection ...
end

Managers Controller:
def list
@models = WriteModel.find :all
end

Users Controller:
@@connections = [ReadModel1, ReadModel2, … ReadModelN]

def list
  read_model = @@connections[rand N]
  @models = read_model.find :all
end

Assuming this works at all :-), an enhancement would be to store which
model
class to use in the session once and reuse the same connection for the
rest
of that session.