Sequel Interview with Jeremy Evans

With the recent release of Sequel 2.9.0, I've finally taken the time to interview Jeremy Evans, the project's maintainer. Back in Jan 2008, I interview Sharon Rosner (the former maintainer). Sequel has come a long way since then, so it's about time I revisited the project.

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You took over Sequel from Sharon Rosner almost a year ago. How and why did you end up holding the reins on this project?

Jeremy My first experience with Sequel was with Sequel 1.2, in February of 2008. I was looking for an additional ORM to support in my Scaffolding Extensions project, and had already added support for ActiveRecord and DataMapper. At the time, Sequel didn't really have support for model associations, and the recommendation was to just implement your own methods to get associated objects.

I worked on a simple associations implementation for Sequel that was only around 60 lines and handled the three main association types (many_to_one, one_to_many, many_to_many) with full reflection support. I posted on the Sequel mailing list with it and Sharon liked it. It became the basis for the association support Sequel introduced in 1.3, and I was given subversion commit rights.

In the middle of March 2008, Sharon emailed four of the developers with subversion commit rights and asked if we could assume leadership of Sequel, since he was planning to move on from programming and do something completely different. I was one of the two developers that responded, and initially I was only going to be responsible for sequel_model. I ended up taking over maintenance of sequel_core a couple months afterward, since the other developer didn't have enough time to maintain it.

With Merb being merged into Rails, do you see a future for Sequel in Rails 3.0?

Jeremy Yes. I'm guessing the merb_sequel plugin will be ported over to Rails 3.0.

It's fairly easy to use Sequel in Rails already, just by requiring it and setting up a database connection with Sequel.connect. I have 5 Rails projects that use Sequel in this manner.

It's good to have people using the projects they're working on. What kinds of changes have you made to Sequel based on the way you use it?

Jeremy The association code was designed to be easy to use by my Scaffolding Extensions project. The eager loading code was designed to be fairly similar in usage to ActiveRecord's, making it easy for me to convert projects from ActiveRecord to Sequel.

On my largest Rails project, I often had cases where associated objects needed to refer back to their parent objects:

 artist.albums.each{|albums| p album.artist}

That causes issues because ActiveRecord will do a query for each album to get the artist. I originally handled this in ActiveRecord by doing something like:

 Artist.has_many :albums, :include=>:artist

I never liked this way of doing things, so I changed Sequel's association implementation so that the parent association is cached (the ActiveRecord parental_control plugin does something similar, I hear).

I only add things to Sequel itself if they are generic and not tied to any specific implementation. The most recent example of this is support I added to Sequel for Giftsmas. Giftsmas runs on PostgreSQL and uses triggers to handle some constraints. I added {create,drop}_{language,function,trigger} methods to the PostgreSQL adapter, which are generic enough they can be used by any PostgreSQL user. I then created the sequel_postgresql_triggers project, which has specific implementations of some common column types (counter/sum cache columns, immutable columns, timestamp columns). Giftsmas uses sequel_postgresql_triggers in it's migration to set up the database.

I didn't add the code in sequel_postgresql_triggers to Sequel itself because they are specific implementations, and there are other (perhaps better) ways of doing the same thing.

What kind of tools are you using to help with code quality — test coverage, complexity, refactoring, etc.?

Jeremy I test coverage before every release, anything less than 100% gets fixed. 100% code coverage means nothing, but less than 100% code coverage means something.

I don't use any IDE refactoring support (I code in vim and SciTE depending on the situation). I don't use any ABC metrics to measure code complexity. There are parts of Sequel that could definitely do with refactoring, but I generally wait to refactor until I'm going do make changes to the code that refactoring will help. I don't refactor for it's own sake.

I use TDD when the problem space is known and I know what outputs I want for each input. I'd say I do TDD for new features about 50% of the time, and about 90% of the time for bug fixes.

In an interview with InfoQ, you talked about eight things you thought had gotten better with Sequel. What's improved since then?

Jeremy That was shortly after the 2.7.0 release, so the major improvements since then are:

• Database stored procedure support in the MySQL and JDBC adapters.
• Much better support for database schemas.
• Much improved compound SQL statement support (i.e. UNION, EXCEPT, and INTERSECT).

For full details, please see the release notes:

• 2.8.0
• 2.9.0

What do you see happening in the next major Sequel release?

Jeremy I expect the 2.10.0 release of Sequel to include:

• A Firebird adapter.
• A DataObjects (the underlying database connection libary used by DataMapper) adapter.
• Better handling of MySQL CREATE TABLE options, such as the ability to specify an engine.

I don't have any other major plans for 2.10.0, but most of Sequel's new features originate in the community (in ideas if not code), so I'm sure there will be other improvements.

Sequel 2.10.0 will probably be released in the first half of February 2009.

That's pretty aggressive. How do you keep your release cycle short?

Jeremy I put all but the simplest commits through the same test suites I put the releases. Releases are generally time based, not feature based. If a feature isn't ready and is going to hold up the release more than a week, it just goes in the next release. For example, the firebird adapter is already mostly complete and was going to be in 2.9.0, but the developer working on it asked for a little more time to polish it, so it didn't make 2.9.0 and will have to wait for 2.10.0.

How closely do you watch other ORMs (Ruby or non-Ruby)? Which ones seem most interesting to you? What do you learn from them?

Jeremy I browse the DataMapper mailing list and periodically chat with the DataMapper developers on IRC. I generally look at the "What's New in Rails" posts to see what is going on in ActiveRecord. However, I don't follow either very closely. I also spent a bit of time looking at Lone, a PostgreSQL-specific ruby ORM.

DataMapper is interesting in that their focus is very different from Sequel's, in that they are aiming to be a persistance framework for generic classes. I don't have any experience with their recent code, though, the last time I used DataMapper was in the 0.2.5/0.3 timeframe.

I'm sure ActiveRecord taught me a few things, as I used it for years, but that's probably at a more subconcious level. Lone's prepared statement support gave me some ideas for the prepared statement interface in Sequel. I don't think I spent enough time using DataMapper to learn anything specific.

Why do you think sequel is a compelling option for a Ruby ORM?

Jeremy

• Sequel code is generally clear and consise, and it has a very rubyish syntax.
• Sequel::Model's associations are the most powerful of any ruby ORM, as Sequel allows the user much more control over how the associations work.
• Sequel is especially compelling whenever you are dealing with sets of objects instead of single objects.
• Sequel is very easy to contribute to. You don't need 3 +1s. Submit a pull request, post on the mailing, or ping me on IRC and I generally review patches quickly and decide if they are a good fit or not.
• Bugs in Sequel are generally fixed quickly. The Sequel bug tracker has no open bugs currently, and that is how it is most of the time.
• Sequel's internals are clean and easy to extend and modify if you need to.
• Sequel's connection pool doesn't require the user or framework clean up connections manually.

Any closing thoughts or advice for people looking at Sequel?

Jeremy The Sequel community is very friendly, so if you have any issues getting things setup or have questions about how things work after reading the documentation, stop by the Google Group) or IRC (#sequel on Freenode) and hopefully we can help you out.