Nested Classes in Ruby

You could create classes inside another classes in Ruby.  In Ruby, classes defined are stored as constants with same name as class. And as you know Ruby class definitions are executable code and it execute in the context of that class as the current object.   That means any classes (say B,C) defined  inside another class (A) would act like constants of that outer class ( as A::B, A::C).

 Lets look at some code

class A
  def test_method
    “I AM NOW IN CLASS A”
  end
  class B
    def test_method
      “I AM NOW IN CLASS B”
    end
  end
end

p A.new.test_method      –> “I AM NOW IN CLASS A”
p A::B.new.test_method   –> “I AM NOW IN CLASS B”

See how we accessed Class B as A::B

PostgreSQL Log Analysis using Ruby’s PQA

Lastweek I had to look at a slow postgreSQL server to figure out what queries taking long time and identify bottlenecks. So I thought of trying out Ruby’s Practical Query  Analysis (PQA). So here is the way to install and use it on a RedHat Linux box already running PostgreSQL 7/8.

Step1 : Install Ruby

Download Source ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

$ tar -xvfz ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

$ cd ruby-1.8.5

$ configure

$ make

$ make install

Step 2: Install Ruby gems

Download rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

$ tar -xvfz rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

$ cd rubygems-0.9.4

$ ruby setup.rb

Step 3: Install Practical Query Analysis

Download pga gem

$ gem install pqa-1.6.gem

Step 4: Configure PostgreSQL 

In postgresql.conf file, makesure these settings are on

log_statement  true

log_duration   true

log_pid        true

Restart PostgreSQL to make these changes in effect.In my case postgresql is setup as a service to start at boot. so restarting is easy.

service postgresql restart

Step 5:   Use PQA to anlayze log

pqa -file /path/to/your/logfile -normalize -top 5

To generate a HTML Report

pqa -file /path/to/your/logfile -normalize -top 5 -format html > /tmp/myReport.html

Thats it!. You could find slowest queires, most run queries and other cool stuff from this great tool.  you could out details and detailed documentation at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pqa/