Oracle patches for Rails

The code I described and provided earlier in my entry: Rails, db_structure_dump, and Oracle was submitted as a patch to Rails around the time of the 0.13.0 release. I just received an email today closing the ticket, showing that the patch was closed in favor of ticket #1798. Curious, I poked around looking at ticket 1798. It includes a number or oracle related patches for Rails, including my implementation of structure_dump.

The patches will give the Oracle adapter a number of improvements. Improvements related to the structure_dump implementation are the implementation of purging and cloning Oracle databases. Some bigger changes include the ability to use synonyms and a change which could break existing users: Using sequences on a per-table basis. Previously, Rails used a single sequence to generate the primary keys for all tables. The next release will change the behavior to create and use sequences in the form “#{table_name}_seq” which is more common practice.

The current stance is that existing Oracle users who want to retain the single, global sequence will have to modify their environment.rb (after the next Rails release) to include:

ActiveRecord::Base.set_sequence_name = "rails_sequence"

Update: As of Rails 1.0 RC3, the way to set the sequence name for all ActiveRecord's has changed from the initial proposal. Now, you'd do something like so:

# Post 0.13.1, Force the OCI Adapter to use the global sequence like it used to
class ActiveRecord::Base
  set_sequence_name "rails_sequence"
end