Railsconf Europe 2006 part 3: introducing Rails to a bank and MySQL optimization

24 Sep 2006 21:58 - (0) comments

Introducing Rails to a Bank

On day 2 of Railsconf, Rany Keddo did a great presentation about introducing Rails to a bank. His recommended tactics are: don't mention you're using Rails, win time and convince the people of the development speed. Rany mentioned he foresaw some risks in choosing Rails. For instance, his application had to connect to a legacy application build in C. But they figured they could always code the hard stuff in Java. 'Suprisingly' this wasn't needed. Rany showed the 10 lines of Ruby code that let Rails talk to the legacy application.

Someone in the audience offered another great tip on introducing Rails: build a quick prototype in Rails then ask for 10 man months to build it in Java.

Optimizing MySQL

Jan Kneschke, senior developer at MySQL, talked about getting the most out of MySQL.
The fastest query is the one that's never called. Memory is the cheapest, fastest, easiest way of increasing preformance. So first try to increase the memory size.
A normal Rails query calls all fields of the database. If there are large columns you could get some performance gains here by ignoring some fields in slow queries.
What are the slow queries? Use the slow query log.