Storing large amount of boolean values in Rails

Question

I am to store quite large amount of boolean values in database used by Rails application - it needs to store 60 boolean values in single record per day. What is best way to do this in Rails?

Queries that I will need to program or execute: * CRUD * summing up how many true values are for each day * possibly (but not nessesarily) other reports like how often true is recorded in each of field

UPDATE: This is to store events that may or may not occur in 5 minute intervals between 9am and 1pm. If it occurs, then I need to set it to true , if not then false . Measurements are done manually and users will be reporting these information using checkboxes on the website. There might be small updates, but most of the time it's just one time entry and then queries as listed above.

UPDATE 2 : 60 values per day is per one user, there will be between 1000-2000 users. If there isn't some library that helps with that, I will go for simplest approach and deal with it later if I will get issues with performance. Every day user reports events by checking desired checkboxes on the website, so there is normally a single data entry moment per day (or few if not done on daily basis).

Answer 1

This is dependent on a lot of different things. Do you need callbacks to run? Do you need AR objects instantiated? What is the frequency of these updates? Is it done frequently but not many at a time or rarely but a bunch at once? Could you represent these booleans as a mask instead? We definitely need more context.

Answer 2

Why do these need to be in a single record? Can't you use a 'days' table to tie them all together, then use a day_id column in your 'events' table?

Specify in the Day model that it 'has_many :events' and specify in the Event model file that it 'belongs_to :day'. Then you can find all the events for a day with just the id for the day.

For the third day record, you'd do this:

this_day = Day.find 3

Then you can you use 'this_day.events' to get all the events for that day.

You'll need to decide what you wish to use to identify each day so you query for a day's events using something that you understand. The id column I used above to find it probably won't work.

You could use the timestamp first moment of each day to do that, for example. Or you could rely upon the 'created_at' column of the table to be between the start and end of a day

And you'll want to be sure to thing about what time zone you are using and how this will be stored in the database.

And if your data will be stored close to midnight, daylight savings time could also be an issue. I find it best to use GMT to avoid that issue.

Good luck.