Running validations when using `update_all`

Question

According to the Rails docs here and here, using update_all does not do the following -

• It skips validations
• It does not update the updated_at field
• It silently ignores the :limit and :order methods

I'm trying to go through my code base and remove instances of update_all, particularly because of the first point.

Is there a way to still have the convenience of update_all and still run validations? I understand that I can loop through each record and save it, but that's not only messier visually but also more more inefficient because it executes N SQL statements instead of 1

# before User.where(status: "active").update_all(status: "inactive") # after User.where(status: "active").each { |u| u.update(status: "inactive") } 

Thanks!

Edit: I'm using Rails 4.2

Answer 1

Unfortunately update_all is way faster because it doesn't instantiate an active record object for each record and instead deals directly with the database. In your case, since you need validations and callbacks, you'll need to instantiate the objects and so you're best bet is iterating in batches of 1000 and performing the update as originally shown. Such as:

User.where(status: "active").find_each { |u| u.update(status: "inactive") } 

The find_each method only loads 1000 objects at a time thus not overloading the garbage collector. If you have bulk records in the hundreds of thousands of rows I'd consider going back to update_all or moving the updating to a background task since it can easily cause a timeout when deployed.