Originally posted on the Ruby on Rails Blog

Greetings, all! Daniel here, together with my pup (🐶 woof!) bringing you the latest news in Rails.

Add support for horizontal sharding

The good folks at GitHub have done an incredible amount of work to support multiple databases in Rails. This week brings horizontal sharding. Rails applications can now connect to and (manually) switch between multiple shards.

Support gzip for the schema cache

Katrina continues to work on the schema cache, this time by adding gzip support for both the YAML and the Marshal serialization strategies. This can come in handy when trying to deploy particularly large schemas in constrained environments.

Add additional multi-database rake tasks

It is now possible to run rails db:schema:dump, rails db:schema:load, rails db:structure:dump, rails db:structure:load and rails db:test:prepare on a specific database. This was previously only possible for rails db:create, rails db:drop, and rails db:migrate. Excellent work on your first few commits to Rails, Kyle!

Eliminate a hash allocation when rendering templates

I included this one for the commit message more than for the code change itself. The benchmark taught me a bit about Action Controller, Action View, and how to write a good benchmark.

That’s all for now. 18 people contributed since last time, including some first-time contributors. Check out the full list of changes.