PaperTrail VS Discard

With Ruby on Rails one can use https://github.com/paper-trail-gem/paper_trail which will keep a record of every database change. Similarly one could record every database query on the database server.

Looking at clicks sounds like recording the screen of the user. Too many privacy issues IMHO even for an internal tool.

The primary culprits were two tables (and their huge indexes) that contributed approximately 90% to the total size of the database. One of them was an audit trail (paper trail versions, to be exact), and the second one was more domain-specific for short-term rentals. It's a pre-computed cache of prices for properties depending on various conditions so that they don't need to be computed each time on the fly and can be easily distributed to other services.

if the source (web) application makes their own audit tables. ex: our ruby on rails application uses the paper-trail gem

Start with https://github.com/paper-trail-gem/paper_trail

We use paper_trail for this

I think you could use that in conjunction with the paper_trail gem, as /u/GreenCalligrapher571 mentioned, which is also a good suggestion. As an additional note, when changing records in production while using the paper_trail gem, I suggest wrapping your database-mutating statements executed in the rails console within a whodunnit block, so PaperTrail.request(whodunnit: 'Dorian Marié') { widget.update name: 'Wibble' } or something rather than just widget.update name: 'Wibble'. Or, if you have some sort of issue-tracking / ticketing system, you could set the whodunnit value to the ticket number or whatever, and then anyone who wants to know why the records are in the state they're in can consult that ticket, which hopefully has additional relevant context.

For a while we did this using the paper-trail gem. This was a very simple way to add a few lines of code to keep track of all of the changes made to an ActiveRecord model. But it came with one drawback. Every change to the data had to be done through ActiveRecord. There are often times when this makes an app vulnerable to a race condition. I’ll use a contrived example so as not to share any real code from our client’s app.

In most designs, this would probably not be possible unless a table tracking extension is being used in an ORM. Even with change tracking enabled through extensions like paper trail or Django simple history, it can be tricky to restore deleted entities. Object tracking would need to have been enabled before it is needed to ensure the data is still around to be restored.

Hello there! I am using the Discard gem. I basically want new records associated to them to be invalid.

discard - a soft-delete implementation that avoids a lot of the gotchas associated with paranoia or acts_as_paranoid gem.

add discard

indeed discard offers better performance options than paranoia: https://github.com/jhawthorn/discard#working-with-associations