Raymond O'connor wrote:
Hi,
I'm working on a web-store app and ran into an interesting problem. I have to maintain a very large inventory from multiple facilities. Due to database performance concerns I've separated the inventories of each facility into a separate table. So now I have active record models for a bunch of tables like inventory_a and inventory_b. There are times, however, when I still want to treat all these tables as one. For example, for a product search I would like to be able to call find_by_sku() and have it call that method on each inventory table model.
I'm currently planning on creating an inventory_all model (that does not subclass Active Record). It would contain all the methods that I would want to call on all the inventory tables as a whole, and I would end up calling it’s methods when I want to access all inventory tables (ie InventoryAll.find_by_sku). I can't help but think that there is something I'm missing, though. Is there a better way to do this?
Cheers!
A database that supported partitioned tables could simplify things greatly.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning-overview.html
Not sure if MySQL 5.1 is quite production ready yet, but that sounds like it would perfectly solve your problem at the source.
Jack
