- Adding Foreign Keys In Migrations
- Cascading Deletes
- Indexes
- Naming foreign keys
- Dependent Removals
- Alternative primary keys with has_one associations
Foreign Keys & Associations
When adding an association to a model you must also add a foreign key. For example, say you have the following model:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :posts
end
Here you will need to add a foreign key on column posts.user_id
. This ensures
that data consistency is enforced on database level. Foreign keys also mean that
the database can very quickly remove associated data (e.g. when removing a
user), instead of Rails having to do this.
Adding Foreign Keys In Migrations
Foreign keys can be added concurrently using add_concurrent_foreign_key
as
defined in Gitlab::Database::MigrationHelpers
. See the Migration Style
Guide for more information.
Keep in mind that you can only safely add foreign keys to existing tables after
you have removed any orphaned rows. The method add_concurrent_foreign_key
does not take care of this so you’ll need to do so manually.
Cascading Deletes
Every foreign key must define an ON DELETE
clause, and in 99% of the cases
this should be set to CASCADE
.
Indexes
When adding a foreign key in PostgreSQL the column is not indexed automatically, thus you must also add a concurrent index. Not doing so will result in cascading deletes being very slow.
Naming foreign keys
By default Ruby on Rails uses the _id
suffix for foreign keys. So we should
only use this suffix for associations between two tables. If you want to
reference an ID on a third party platform the _xid
suffix is recommended.
The spec spec/db/schema_spec.rb
will test if all columns with the _id
suffix
have a foreign key constraint. So if that spec fails, don’t add the column to
IGNORED_FK_COLUMNS
, but instead add the FK constraint, or consider naming it
differently.
Dependent Removals
Don’t define options such as dependent: :destroy
or dependent: :delete
when
defining an association. Defining these options means Rails will handle the
removal of data, instead of letting the database handle this in the most
efficient way possible.
In other words, this is bad and should be avoided at all costs:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :posts, dependent: :destroy
end
Should you truly have a need for this it should be approved by a database specialist first.
You should also not define any before_destroy
or after_destroy
callbacks on
your models unless absolutely required and only when approved by database
specialists. For example, if each row in a table has a corresponding file on a
file system it may be tempting to add a after_destroy
hook. This however
introduces non database logic to a model, and means we can no longer rely on
foreign keys to remove the data as this would result in the file system data
being left behind. In such a case you should use a service class instead that
takes care of removing non database data.
Alternative primary keys with has_one associations
Sometimes a has_one
association is used to create a one-to-one relationship:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :user_config
end
class UserConfig < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
end
In these cases, there may be an opportunity to remove the unnecessary id
column on the associated table, user_config.id
in this example. Instead,
the originating table ID can be used as the primary key for the associated
table:
create_table :user_configs, id: false do |t|
t.references :users, primary_key: true, default: nil, index: false, foreign_key: { on_delete: :cascade }
...
end
Setting default: nil
will ensure a primary key sequence is not created, and since the primary key
will automatically get an index, we set index: false
to avoid creating a duplicate.
You will also need to add the new primary key to the model:
class UserConfig < ActiveRecord::Base
self.primary_key = :user_id
belongs_to :user
end