UUIDs (Universally unique identifiers) are really neat as IDs, and they allow you to have the ID of a model before it is even saved and guarantee that it won’t be fail insertion due to the ID being taken already. They’re also a full class type in PostgreSQL which is even more badass because it will handle the storage part, meaning you don’t have the drag on performance that would come along if you had just placed the UUID in a varchar (or equivelent).

When you try to use UUIDs with Rails, things fall apart with #find_in_batches because its implementation abuses value comparisons to get a performance benefit when paging through results (source). We started using UUIDs on a few models, so I wrote a new version of #find_in_batches that can work with either type of ID (but does not support the :start option).

This also fixes #find_each because #find_each uses #find_in_batches under the covers.

I figured it’d be useful to someone eventually, so here’s the code:

in lib/clean_find_in_batches.rb

module CleanFindInBatches

  def self.included(base)
    base.class_eval do
      alias :old_find_in_batches :find_in_batches
      alias :find_in_batches :replacement_find_in_batches
    end
  end

  # Override due to implementation of regular find_in_batches
  # conflicting using UUIDs
  def replacement_find_in_batches(options = {}, &block)
    relation = self
    return old_find_in_batches(options, &block) if relation.primary_key.is_a?(Arel::Attributes::Integer)
    # Throw errors like the real thing
    if (finder_options = options.except(:batch_size)).present?
      raise "You can't specify an order, it's forced to be #{batch_order}" if options[:order].present?
      raise "You can't specify a limit, it's forced to be the batch_size" if options[:limit].present?
      raise 'You can\'t specify start, it\'s forced to be 0 because the ID is a string' if options.delete(:start)
      relation = apply_finder_options(finder_options)
    end
    # Compute the batch size
    batch_size = options.delete(:batch_size) || 1000
    offset = 0
    # Get the relation and keep going over it until there's nothing left
    relation = relation.except(:order).order(batch_order).limit(batch_size)
    while (results = relation.offset(offset).limit(batch_size).all).any?
      block.call results
      offset += batch_size
    end
    nil
  end

end

and in config/initializers/clean_find_in_batches.rb

ActiveRecord::Batches.send(:include, CleanFindInBatches)