Back in the 80's disk space was precious. That's why we came out with table "normalization" for relational databases.

While this concept is still valid, disk space has become ridicously cheap, and, there's a lot of cases where performance is more important than disk space.

You could! But, eager loading still loads the models into memory. Such a memory waste, specially if the parent models are big.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'cached_belongs_to'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install cached_belongs_to

Currently, it works with a traditional belongs_to - has_many associations between two models.

Just use it as you would normally use belongs_to. Add the :caches option to specify the fields in the association that you want to cache.

#
# table: authors
#   name:string
#
class Author
  has_many :books
end

#
# table: books
#   author_id:integer
#   author_name:string
#
class Book
  cached_belongs_to :author, :caches => :name
end

You will need a database field in the books table to hold the cached value:

class AddCachedBelongsToBooks < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :books, :author_name, :string
  end
end

And, that's it. Everytime you hange the Author, it will come back and update the cached fields on the Book model.

So, now on your views you can just call:

book.author_name

And won't pay the price of loading the whole Author model in memory, nor the query time.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

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