I recently helped an intern at Hedgeye work through a problem with a database query. Because I’m working in a separate timezone, I ended up making suggestions through a GitHub pull request. We discussed and decided that what I wrote was self-contained enough that I should re-post so it can help others.

:conditions => ["event_type != ?", 'LOGIN'||'LOGOUT'],

I don’t think this is doing quite what you think…

'LOGIN' || 'LOGOUT' # => 'LOGIN'

So this turns into:

where event_type != 'LOGIN'

I’m guessing you meant to do:

where event_type != 'LOGIN' or event_type != 'LOGOUT'

But, believe it or not, != is a MySQL proprietary extension to SQL. It would probably be best to use something that’s a part of ANSI SQL:

where event_type <> 'LOGIN' or event_type <> 'LOGOUT'
-- alternative:
where event_type not in ('LOGIN', 'LOGOUT')

Because these are literals (not user-provided values), there’s no point in sanitization using ?.

Conclusion:

:conditions => "event_type not in ('LOGIN', 'LOGOUT')",