Attach comments to your ActiveRecord queries. By default, it adds the application, controller, and action names as a comment at the end of each query.
This helps when searching log files for queries, and seeing where slow queries came from.
For example, once enabled, your logs will look like:
Account Load (0.3ms) SELECT `accounts`.* FROM `accounts`
WHERE `accounts`.`queenbee_id` = 1234567890
LIMIT 1
/*application:BCX,controller:project_imports,action:show*/
You can also use these query comments along with a tool like pt-query-digest to automate identification of controllers and actions that are hotspots for slow queries.
This gem was created at 37signals. You can read more about how we use it on our blog.
This has been tested and used in production with the mysql2 and pg gems, and is tested on Rails 5.2 through 6.1, and Ruby 2.6 through 3.0. It is also tested for sqlite3. As of Rails 7, Marginalia is a part of Rails itself and does not need to be separately included.
Rails version support will follow supported versions in the Ruby on Rails maintenance policy and Ruby support will follow maintained versions in the Ruby maintenance policy.
Patches are welcome for other database adapters.
# Gemfile
gem 'marginalia'
Optionally, you can set the application name shown in the log like so in an initializer (e.g. config/initializers/marginalia.rb
):
Marginalia.application_name = "BCX"
The name will default to your Rails application name.
You can also configure the components of the comment that will be appended,
by setting Marginalia::Comment.components
. By default, this is set to:
Marginalia::Comment.components = [:application, :controller, :action]
Which results in a comment of
application:#{application_name},controller:#{controller.name},action:#{action_name}
.
You can re-order or remove these components. You can also add additional
comment components of your desire by defining new module methods for
Marginalia::Comment
which return a string. For example:
module Marginalia
module Comment
def self.mycommentcomponent
"TEST"
end
end
end
Marginalia::Comment.components = [:application, :mycommentcomponent]
Which will result in a comment like
application:#{application_name},mycommentcomponent:TEST
The calling controller is available to these methods via @controller
.
Marginalia ships with :application
, :controller
, and :action
enabled by
default. In addition, implementation is provided for:
:line
(for file and line number calling query). :line supports a configuration by setting a regexp inMarginalia::Comment.lines_to_ignore
to exclude parts of the stacktrace from inclusion in the line comment.:controller_with_namespace
to include the full classname (including namespace) of the controller.:job
to include the classname of the ActiveJob being performed.:hostname
to includeSocket.gethostname
.:pid
to include current process id.:db_host
to include the configured database hostname.:socket
to include the configured database socket.:database
to include the configured database name.
Pull requests for other included comment components are welcome.
By default marginalia appends the comments at the end of the query. Certain databases, such as MySQL will truncate the query text. This is the case for slow query logs and the results of querying some InnoDB internal tables where the length of the query is more than 1024 bytes.
In order to not lose the marginalia comments from your logs, you can prepend the comments using this option:
Marginalia::Comment.prepend_comment = true
In addition to the request or job-level component-based annotations, Marginalia may be used to add inline annotations to specific queries using a block-based API.
For example, the following code:
Marginalia.with_annotation("foo") do
Account.where(queenbee_id: 1234567890).first
end
will issue this query:
Account Load (0.3ms) SELECT `accounts`.* FROM `accounts`
WHERE `accounts`.`queenbee_id` = 1234567890
LIMIT 1
/*application:BCX,controller:project_imports,action:show*/ /*foo*/
Nesting with_annotation
blocks will concatenate the comment strings.
Be careful when using Marginalia with prepared statements. If you use a component
like request_id
then every query will be unique and so ActiveRecord will create
a new prepared statement for each potentially exhausting system resources.
Disable prepared statements
if you wish to use components with high cardinality values.
Start by bundling and creating the test database:
bundle
rake db:mysql:create
rake db:postgresql:create
Then, running rake
will run the tests on all the database adapters (mysql
, mysql2
, postgresql
and sqlite
):
rake