From: Pit Capitain <pit@...>
Date: 2007-02-08T23:41:43+09:00
Subject: Re: General Approach to Data Validation

Drew Olson schrieb:
> I posted some questions yesterday about getting ActiveRecord working
> with Oracle 10g, and I'm happy to say I was successful. ActiveRecord
> makes pulling and manipulating data so easy. Now, I'm writing some data
> validation scripts. Here's the goal: given two data sources, confirm
> that specific fields in the first table are the same as the fields in
> the 2nd for the same record, check to see if there are records in the
> 1st table that aren't in the 2nd, and vise-versa. I was wondering if my
> general approach is the fastest way to do this, as I'm not new to ruby
> but generally new to writing high performance sql (and thus the
> corresponding ActiveRecord statements). I'm working with very large
> datasets here and want to streamline the code as much as possible.

Drew, I would try to perform the comparison inside the database, 
especially if your datasets are "very large". (How large is this 
actually?) Given that you are working with Oracle, I would use Oracle's 
database links to get access to both tables.

Regards,
Pit