New gem to add deadlines to Active Record ignored columns

rubyonrails-talk
1

There was a tweet from Intercom recently about having the obsolete ignored columns definitions in the application for quite a while and they were sending ~20 TB of extra text to the database per day - https://x.com/ciaran_lee/status/1953084875193385200.

We had the same problem (lots of huge SQL queries were sent to the database, stored in monitoring, logs etc), so I created a new gem that allows to add deadlines to ignored columns, and this won’t happen again GitHub - fatkodima/smart_ignored_columns: Add deadlines to Active Record `ignored_columns` .

Sample usage:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  self.ignored_columns += [
    { name: "first_name", remove_after: "2025-08-24" }
  ]
end

Sample output:

$> bundle exec rake smart_ignored_columns:obsolete

The following `ignored_columns` definitions are obsolete and can be removed:

User
  - email (remove after 2025-08-16)

$> echo $?
1
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