What is the difference between pluck and collect in Rails?
Ruby on-RailsRubyRails ActiverecordRuby on-Rails Problem Overview
Here are two sample codes.
First one with collect
:
User.first.gifts.collect(&:id)
Second one with pluck
:
User.first.gifts.pluck(:id)
Is there any difference between them in performance or something else?
Ruby on-Rails Solutions
Solution 1 - Ruby on-Rails
pluck
is on the db level. It will only query the particular field. See this.
When you do:
User.first.gifts.collect(&:id)
You have objects with all fields loaded and you simply get the id
thanks to the method based on Enumerable.
So:
-
if you only need the
id
with Rails 4, useids
:User.first.gifts.ids
-
if you only need some fields with Rails 4, use
pluck
:User.first.gifts.pluck(:id, :name, ...)
-
if you only need one field with Rails 3, use
pluck
:User.first.gifts.pluck(:id)
-
if you need all fields, use
collect
-
if you need some fields with Rails 4, still use
pluck
-
if you need some fields with Rails 3, use
select
andcollect
Solution 2 - Ruby on-Rails
Yes. According to Rails guides, pluck
directly converts a database result into an array
, without constructing ActiveRecord
objects. This means better performance for a large or often-running query.
In addition to @apneadiving's answer, pluck
can take both single and multiple column names as argument:
Client.pluck(:id, :name)
# SELECT clients.id, clients.name FROM clients
# => [[1, 'David'], [2, 'Jeremy'], [3, 'Jose']]
Solution 3 - Ruby on-Rails
The basic and main difference is that Pluck applies on db level and collect get all data and then return record to you when you need all records use collect and when few fields then use pluck
Solution 4 - Ruby on-Rails
If there is a case where you are using few attributes of the retrieved record. In such cases you should use pluck
.
User.collect(&:email)
In above example if you only need email attribute than you are wasting memory and time. Because it will retrieve all the columns from user table in the database, allocates the memory for each attributes (including the attributes which you will never use)
NOTE: pluck
does not return ActiveRecord_Relation of the user
Solution 5 - Ruby on-Rails
Late to the party, but if you would like a deeper pluck
you can use includes
:
User.all.includes(:groups).pluck("users.id", "users.name", "groups.id", "groups.name")
This results in a bigger array like
[
[12, "Sam", "FriendsRUs", 4],
...
]