About the Book
Build faster, more reliable Rails apps by taking the best advanced PostgreSQL and Active Record capabilities, and using them to solve your application scale and growth challenges. Gain the skills needed to comfortably work with multi-terabyte databases, and with complex Active Record, SQL, and specialized Indexes. Develop your skills with PostgreSQL on your laptop, then take them into production, while keeping everything in sync. Make slow queries fast, perform any schema or data migration without errors, use scaling techniques like read/write splitting, partitioning, and sharding, to meet demanding workload requirements from Internet scale consumer apps to enterprise SaaS.
Deepen your firsthand knowledge of high-scale PostgreSQL databases and Ruby on Rails applications with dozens of practical and hands-on exercises. Unlock the mysteries surrounding complex Active Record. Make any schema or data migration change confidently, without downtime. Grow your experience with modern and exclusive PostgreSQL features like SQL Merge, Returning, and Exclusion constraints. Put advanced capabilities like Full Text Search and Publish Subscribe mechanisms built into PostgreSQL to work in your Rails apps. Improve the quality of the data in your database, using the advanced and extensible system of types and constraints to reduce and eliminate application bugs. Tackle complex topics like how to improve query performance using specialized indexes. Discover how to effectively use built-in database functions and write your own, administer replication, and make the most of partitioning and foreign data wrappers. Use more than 40 well-supported open source tools to extend and enhance PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails. Gain invaluable insights into database administration by conducting advanced optimizations - including high-impact database maintenance - all while solving real-world operational challenges.
Take your new skills into production today and then take your PostgreSQL and Rails applications to a whole new level of reliability and performance.
What You Need:
A computer running macOS, Linux, or Windows and WSL2
PostgreSQL version 16, installed by package manager, compiled, or running with Docker
An Internet connection
About the Author :
Andrew Atkinson has worked as a Software Engineer with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL for more than a decade. At Microsoft, Groupon, and various startups, he's built, mentored, and influenced teams, and operated and scaled systems, improving their quality and reliability. He's presented on PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails at conferences, appeared on podcasts, and has written for the official Ruby on Rails weblog, with the goal of helping developers solve their challenges using these powerful open source technologies.
Review :
Wow, what an incredible learning experience! This book will provide Rails developers with the knowledge and confidence to adeptly manage projects as their data scales. The book not only instills best practices but also equips developers to counter the instinctive reactions advocating for a transition to microservices, serverless architectures, or alternative technologies like MongoDB, Kafka, and more. It's a valuable resource that not only addresses performance challenges but empowers developers to make informed decisions about their application architecture in the face of growing data demands.—Daniela Baron, Software Engineer
This book is the missing link. Andrew has written the most valuable resource for Rails application developers looking to optimize database performance and scale with ease.—Nate Berkopec, Ruby on Rails performance consultant
This is the PostgreSQL manual for Ruby on Rails we’ve been missing. Andrew's combined PostgreSQL and Rails knowledge in this book will give you more confidence working with SQL and Active Record. This is without a doubt one of my recommended resources moving forward.—Jason Charnes, Staff Software Developer, Co-Host of the Remote Ruby podcast
I love that this book lives in two worlds, Rails and Postgres, which are tightly coupled together when running a production application, but are typically separated in terms of knowledge communities. This book brings together a body of knowledge from two different focus areas, Rails and Postgres, to strengthen the application and data relationship. This book is a key resource for anyone running Rails in production at scale.—Elizabeth Christensen, Crunchy Data
A book with this information in it would've allowed me to shortcut several years off of learning Postgres the hard way.—David Bryant Copeland
A veritable PostgreSQL “cheat sheet” for the busy application developer, I wish this book existed earlier. Filled front to back with practical, useful examples of common database problems and their solutions, it serves as a killer resource for any dev interested in solving pressing, challenging PostgreSQL problems they may face.—Brian Davis
With this book Andrew has demystified DBA concepts so you can go beyond Rails and into PostgreSQL, when scaling starts to hit. The ideas and recommendations on building a performance database, optimizing with bulk upserts, and ensuring data integrity will be particularly handy to gain insight into how your app's data is evolving. The book's expert advice is explained clearly throughout —it’s useful to any Rails developer that's wondering if they need to pay their PaaS more, or if there's an alternative through gaining more insight into how their app is scaling.
—Kasper Timm Hansen, ex-Rails core and Rails consultant
This book gave me the confidence and the motivation to elevate the performance of my Rails apps in a way I couldn’t quite unlock before.—Ifat Ribon, Principal Architect, LaunchPad Lab
