High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL David Berube (Berube Consulting) From the official conference description is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/6942 MySQL is among the fastest relational databases commonly available today; unfortunately, the database alone is only part of the picture. For todays web applications, the one weak link in the entire performance chain from the network to the web application and ending in the database can cause an entire application to seem slow. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails on exacerbates this problem: Rails makes it easy to develop complicated web applications fast, but it also makes it easy to access your databases in an extremely inefficient manner. Thousands of queries may be generated when just a few are necessary. Even if you can get past that problem, ActiveRecord itself can be a problem: it may create thousands or even millions of  []

OpenSolaris Web Stack (http://opensolaris.org/os/project/webstack) is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

Although the popular Ruby on Rails framework is known for its ability to quickly build web applications, getting the most favorable performance out of the standard database, MySQL, takes a little bit of effort. This session will cover simple techniques and tricks for optimizing the interaction of the Rails ActiveRecord for MySql.