At OmbuLabs, we are big fans of Ruby on Rails and design patterns, especially convention over configuration! The beauty of Rails is that you can inherit a legacy project and easily find the different layers of code in different directories.

When it comes to database migrations the policy of Rails is very clear. It’s all about altering the database structure with gradual migration files: “Migrations are a convenient way to alter your database schema over time in a consistent and easy way.” (source)

But, what about data migrations? What’s the best way to write, maintain, and run migrations that alter the data in your production database?

In this article I will talk about three different patterns for writing and maintaining your data migrations:

1. Data migrations in db/migrate
2. Data migrations with a set of Rake tasks
3. Data migrations with data_migrate

If you are interested in Ruby and Rails performance, you have definitely read articles by Nate Berkopec from Speedshop. At Ombu Labs we are big fans of his work, his Complete Guide to Rails Performance book and Slack community.

When Nate announced a series of public workshops I didn’t hesitate and signed up as quickly as possible. Here are my notes from my experience at the workshop on October 17th.

Some time ago we wrote a couple of Tips for Writing Fast Rails. It was about time we wrote part two so here it is!

We recently spoke with Ryan Findley, Principal at Neomind Labs. We worked with his team to execute a Rails upgrade from 2.3 to 4.2 on one of their applications.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 5.1 to 5.2.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the first OmbuCast by OmbuLabs. In this screencast we’ll be taking a look at the derailed_benchmarks gem, and how you can use it to benchmark your Rails application and find, and hopefully fix bottlenecks in your code.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 5.0 to 5.1.

Today we are happy to announce the launch of our new microsite: Gemfile.lock Audit Tool - a tool created to allow users to check their Gemfile.lock for vulnerabilities in a quick and secure manner.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.2 to 5.0.

We recently collaborated with Power Home Remodeling on a Rails upgrade for their self-described “monolith CRM/ERP application” and were able to speak to them about their experience with OmbuLabs.

This article takes a look at some of the changes to the ActiveRecord::Dirty module between Rails 5.1 and 5.2.

If you’re running Rails 5.1, you may have already seen some of the deprecation warnings related to the API changes contained in it. Most of them are behavior changes, and there are some new additions as well.

To better understand these modifications, we’ll take a look at sample projects in Rails 5.1 and Rails 5.2.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.1 to 4.2.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 4.0 to 4.1.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, check our article title The Rails Upgrade Series.

A previous post covered some general tips to take into account for this migration. This article will try to go a bit more in depth. We will first go from 3.2 to 4.0, then to 4.1 and finally to 4.2. Depending on the complexity of your app, a Rails upgrade can take anywhere from one week for a single developer, to a few months for two developers.

This is part of our Upgrade Rails series. We will be covering the most important aspects that you need to know to update your Ruby on Rails application from version 3.1 to 3.2.