Enhancing your Rails app with SQLite: More ActiveRecord adapter improvements

After opening my first few ActiveRecord PRs last week, I kept going and opened 4 more to bring more key improvements to the SQLite adapter.

All in all, I have opened 3 pull requests to bring larger, existing ActiveRecord features to the SQLite3Adapter:

• support auto-populating columns and custom primary keys
• support generated columns
• support deferred foreign keys

In addition, I have also opened 3 additional pull requests to add some new, SQLite-specific features:

• support || concatenation in default functions
• performance tune default connection configurations
• add retries option as alternative to timeout

I am chatting with the Core team and trying to get all of this work into the upcoming 7.1 release, but nothing is set in stone yet.

Regardless, I thought it would be useful to take the next few posts and dive into the details and use-cases for each of these features in turn. I already started this by writing up how to setup custom primary keys in your Rails app.

Up next, I will write up how to use generated columns in your Rails app. So, keep your eyes out 👀

All posts in this series #

• Part 1 — branch-specific databases
• Part 2 — fine-tuning SQLite configuration
• Part 3 — loading extensions
• Part 4 — setting up Litestream
• Part 5 — optimizing compilation
• Part 6 — array columns
• Part 7 — local snapshots
• Part 8 — Rails improvements
• Part 9 — performance metrics
• Part 10 — custom primary keys
• Part 11 — more Rails improvements
• Part 12 — table schema and metadata
• Part 13 — prefixed ULID keys
• Part 14 — installing extensions