ActiveRecord tables with many columns: is there a better way?

Question

I would like to know whether I am appropriately using table attributes to describe objects or whether there is a more efficient and advisable approach for certain types of attributes.

I have two ActiveRecord tables, foods and lists. Both tables have many columns because each object has many attributes (calories, fat, protein, etc.).

In addition to these intrinsic characteristics, I find myself adding columns to the table for attributes that represent an object’s membership in a group or user-defined properties.

Group membership data indicate whether a food is a dessert or a meat, among other categories. For this, I have columns with binary or categorical (char) data.

User-defined property data include “maximum calories” or “maximum fat” attributes for a list. If I have a column for “maximum” corresponding to each “total” (e.g., “maximum calories” and “total calories”), this of course doubles the number of columns.

Dessert and meat are intrinsic properties in that they cannot be altered by the user, but it seems they could be more efficiently represented by an array of food ids or a hash. Having so many data points (and columns) to represent this simple categorization seems redundant, and my tables are so big. The reason I have not switched to arrays for group membership data is because I like how this data is currently accessible by the object itself. It’s intuitive, centralized, and seemingly less error-prone.

I don’t have an idea for how else I would manage user-defined “maximums” for lists, and maybe this proliferation of columns/attributes is the best option.

I would appreciate any advice or appraisal of my approach and suggestions of possible alternatives.

Answer 1

you can use serialize and store an text object in the database but when you selecting it will be accessed as an HASH or ARRAY again, this can solve the problem for you instead of duplicating fields store it as HASH and then read from it.

check out this:

Rails: Serializing objects in a database?

http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Base/serialize/class