Suggestions for querying the DB for a schedule?

[adambedford]

Has anyone come up with a good solution for querying the DB based on schedule? For example, my use case is to find if there exists a record with duplicate events.

Thanks!

[guilhermegazzinelli]

hi @adambedford

In my current setup, I face a similar challenge with data stored in the DB. I’m currently serializing the schedule data and loading a Montrose instance whenever the model is instantiated. This allows me to access #occurrences and count the events, but it’s definitely a hurdle—especially when you need to track 'virtual' events created by recurrence across many records. Right now, I find myself having to iterate through and instantiate each record individually.

I haven't landed on a truly scalable solution for this yet, but one approach I’ve been considering is to flatten the occurrences into a dedicated database table.

The idea would be to keep the Montrose serialization as the 'Source of Truth' for the rules, but asynchronously sync a secondary event_occurrences table. This would allow for:

Database-level Querying: You could find duplicates or overlaps using standard SQL (like GROUP BY starts_at HAVING count(*) > 1) instead of expensive Ruby iteration.

Performance: Avoiding the N+1 overhead of instantiating Montrose objects for every single record.

Indexing: Making scheduling lookups lightning-fast at the DB level.

It does add the complexity of keeping the cache table in sync, but it seems like a solid path for large datasets.

I’d love to hear what other developers are doing regarding this. Does anyone have a different approach or a 'pitaco' (two cents) to share on this strategy?

Sugestions on that @rossta