Surprised the list doesn't mention PGHero (https://github.com/ankane/pghero). It's been really useful at our company to find slow queries and identify missing indices.
Whoa. This seems very nice. I'm on my phone now and can fully check it, this works directly with PostgreSQL, right? It doesn't matter if the application layer is Rails or Django or whatever, correct?
pghero is a rails app but it just tracks a postgres db, you don't have to embed it into a rails application (though that's an option) you can run it independently.
I wonder why some of these tips, like a statement timeout, aren't the default behavior of Rails. Some things can't be, like pg-bouncer, which makes sense. But why not have pg_stat_statements running on PG? Or have log_lock_waits in each statement?
The appropriate setting for a statement timeout could really depend on the application. 5 seconds is probably sane for 90% of applications, but the other 5% may have a legitimate need for longer running statements.
Yes, but at some point you can't just go around installing all the possible extensions/gems/whatever that you think are "good". The default gemfile would be 300 lines long with "developer happiness" gems such as `oink`, `bullet`, etc etc etc.
Most of the things that Rails is "opinionated" about are far more arbitrary than this, like whether the database primary key should be “id”, “postId”, “posts_id”, or “pid”.
> Most of the things that Rails is "opinionated" about are far more arbitrary than this
To my eye, at least, it isn't a matter of being arbitrary, but rather not having an answer.
PK names don't matter to the machine, so long as everything agrees and modulo illegal values. Humans get massively opinionated, but the machine doesn't care.
Compare with: How long should a query take to run? No, I'm not going to tell you what kind of query, or the size of the dataset, or the hardware at the bottom of the stack, or what the app is actually doing.
It is like asking what specific clothes an arbitrary person should wear.
The key is, I think, the "opinionated" part. Something like "how long should the DB statement timeout be" isn't really something people would have a general opinion on.
Also this stuff is all heavily Postgres specific; I think @nateberkopec's estimate of 300 gems is probably too low, even if you limit it to only say the top five most popular datastores.
Yes, very excited for this! It should replace much of the need for marginalia, really nice to see more of these key things needed to get visibility come into Rails.
