Friday, April 20, 2007

[PLUGIN RELEASE] ActsAsPartitionable

Posted on behalf of Jeffrey Damick:

Introduction

ActsAsPartitionable provides support for using multiple databases to support data partitioning schemes for existing models. This plugin allows models marked as acts_as_partitionable to specify database
partitions to and explicit names to reference those partitions using existing
models. As part of this plugin connection pooling is provided so that many
different models may share the same database for partitions without forcing each partition model object to inherit from a common base class.

Disclaimer

As part of our strategy to address data partitioning we wrote this plugin in preparation to using slave DBs but we are not going to
have those until May 2007. So even though the code is covered with tests (see svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/actsaspartition/trunk/test/unit/partitionable_test.r
b), it has not yet been used in a production environment.

We will have a discovery period in May when the code is likely to be improved so for now you can use is at your own risk. Meanwhile, we would be happy to fix any issue revealed. Drop us a line at rails-trunk [ at ] revolution DOT com.

Using this plugin should not be your first step in application optimization/scaling or even the second one. Before installing it make sure you understand the implication of leveraging multiple DBs (for example, the potential for cross DB joins).

Example

Sample Model


class SomeModel < name =""> "partition_1", :access => :readonly, :db_config => :read_only

# use the default database for partition_2
acts_as_partitionable :name => "partition_2"

# use the a specific w/r database for partition_3
acts_as_partitionable :name => "partition_3", :db_config => :some_model_partition

# Specify the database configuration from a hash
acts_as_partitionable :access => :readonly, :db_config => {:adapter => "mysql", :database => "partionable_db_test", :username => "root", :password => "", :host => "localhost"}
end


Sample DB Config

dbs:

database: master_db
host: master-host

read_only:
database: slave_db
host: slave-host

some_model_partition:
database: slave_db_2
host: slave-host


Usage

r = SomeModel.readonly.find(:first) # executes against the read_only db - slave_db
r.field = 'value'
r.save! # raises ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord
r.readonly? # true

t = SomeModel.partition_3.find(:first) # executes against slave_db_2
t.field = 'some value'
t.save! # success to partition_3

Installation

As plugin:
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/actsaspartition/trunk/vendor/plugins/acts_as_partitionable


License

ActsAsPartitionable is released under the MIT license.


Support

The plugin RubyForge page is http://rubyforge.org/projects/actsaspartition

5 comments:

mattenat said...

Is this the first step toward a plugin which will do some kind of hashing on a key of the model to decide which database (pool) to read/write a particular object from/to? Does this plugin support some kind of introspection as a means of finding the correct database for access?

Jeffrey said...

That's the direction we're heading. We're looking into various ways to provide or choose the algorithms necessary for models to determine db partitions. If you have ideas, please feel free to post or email them.

Eddie Frederick said...

Matt, jeff -- see latest post on data sharding for something I was fooling with for a few hours last year. Not really on my radar right now, but excited to see what comes out of the various attempts to bring partitioning to AR.

Anonymous said...

Can this plugin be used to do CTI (Class Table Inheritance)?

class Asset < AR::Base
end

class Article < Asset
end

Given the above could Article model save the common fields (for Asset) to one table and the extended fields (for Article) to another table...

Or is this solely for scaling to Master/slave configurations?

Jeffrey said...

that would be a good enhancement to be able to support the partitioning schemes through to the children. If you have suggestions on what you'd like this to look like or code patches please send them. thanks!