Thank you to 32 awesome people who contributed to Rails this week, including 5 first-timers! Want to join the party? Get started with the issues page.

This speed optimization will improve the performance of blank? calls against empty strings by about 3.5x. It was further improved to about 30% faster!! BOOM 💪

It is possible to specify comments for tables, columns, and indexes in the database itself now with this addition. It currently works for MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters.

Creating a join table with create_join_table helper used to always create the columns with integer type. But now if you want to have uuid columns or any other type, it's possible!

This fixed issues with intermittent test failures related to the Active Record connection pool trying to return connections at the wrong time.

Rails recently improved performance for inserting schema information using multi-row-insert. But some SQLite versions do not support the multi-row-insert feature which resulted into errors. Now Rails will gracefully handle this situation without an error.