Rosa

A message from the @dhh keynote at #RailsWorld resonated: “it’s more fun to be competent.” This translates perfectly to working with relational databases. Hear me out. Nearly 100% of Rails apps use relational DBs. But is the use of this key part of the stack used competently? Expertly? We generally have limited educational materials in this area, and real world experience can be hard to come by, or be “too late” to solve real issues. I was a barely-competent user myself, and certainly not an “expert.” I didn’t know how to read a query plan in depth, design valuable indexes, or leverage efficient schema design patterns. I wanted to change that. I wanted to become not only competent, but become an expert. I want this for other Rails developers too. I know many want to learn to become expert designers, acquire performance engineering skills, and operate as skilled backend engineers. They want to deliver fast and reliable experiences for their application users. All applications benefit from efficient database design, and in particular data-intensive applications with growing concurrency. That describes most all Rails apps that achieve some success! From B2C to B2B. So what’s the message? If you’re barely competent as a database user, consider going on a learning journey towards competency. I can vouch for the keynote message: It’s more fun to be a competent database user. andyatkinson.com/pgrailsbook