Ruby on Rails

On Jan 4, 2015, at 3:20 PM, D. C. <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
>
> It's not practical to change the database as data arrives from a 3rd
> party provider with a particular structure.

Sure it is--I've done that many times.

Long experience has taught me that if you're dealing with data with a crappy structure, do not try to clean it up outside the db. Use the tools that a powerful database like PG provides. Create a set of tables which mirrors *exactly* the structure of the data you get, no matter how awful it is. Add appropriate indexes. Test everything you can think of. Then move the verified data into a set of reasonably normalized tables.

Now that does assume a pretty bad data structure being handed to you, which is more often than not the case when dealing with legacy systems. But if the data as you're getting it is actually structured reasonably well, but you just want to verify consistency, feel free to ignore that advice and skip the "staging" tables. I just wanted to point out that you really don't have to be bound by the structure of what you get.

--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe@elevated-dev.com
http://www.elevated-dev.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice




--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/C0CE1E67-5C4B-4F95-9E26-318DDF5B4E94%40elevated-dev.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.