ActiveRecordContentBlob

A convenience gem for associating serialized BLOBs with your records, if you happen to use blobs to store data that doesn't need to be scoped.

For example, when backing up Tweet data, a user may find it to have a tweets table containing fields such as created_at, so that they can query for all Tweets within a certain time period. But the other content that comes with a Tweet might be useful later, so it's convenient to stick the entire JSON representation of a Tweet into a BLOB.

But because ActiveRecord::Base will select all columns by default, querying across a large set of tweets will slow performance.

ActiveRecordContentBlob is simply a convenience gem that creates a polymorphic relationship between any other AR table.

Note: This is something I'm playing around with. I don't recommend it for production at this point.

gem install active_record_content_blob

Include it in your Gemfile

bundle install

Run the rake task to modify your database

rails generate content_blob
rake db:migrate

Sample usage:

  record = MusicRecord.new
  record.build_a_blob({'title' => "The Jackson 5"})
  record.save

  record.contents['title']
  # => The Jackson 5