Using Raw SQL snippets to create Thinking-Sphinx Indexes

We have used Thinking-Sphinx in several projects to implement search engines. Thinking-Sphinx is a wrapper in Ruby to use ActiveRecord with Sphinx. But in the project I’m working right now I had to solve a different problem: the user should be able to search for formatted values, however without using the formatting characters, i.e, suppose…

Ruby performance work

Railsconf had several performance-related talks. This one went over a lot of interesting territory. Who knew the Date class performed so badly?? Use equivalent ops in Time or get date::performance Use String::<< instead of String::+= Tune your custom sql with virtual attributes It’s surprising that things we might not think are performance issues are problematic…

RubyMine

During his talk at railsconf, Gregg Pollack showed off Jetbrains Rubymine, an awesome IDE for ruby & rails. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Jetbrains had a spike in their downloads coinciding with the talk. It is a nice IDE. I was happy to see it includes git support out of the box (I…