Silence "unknown OID 17227: failed to recognize type of 'geography'. It will be treated as String."

Question

I'm using columns of type "geography" for some few "point within polygon" queries. They are too few and too simple to bundle a GIS gem, I handle it all on the SQL level.

However, every time Rails boots (rake tasks, console etc), the following warning is spit:

unknown OID 17227: failed to recognize type of 'geography'. It will be treated as String.

I'm fine with "geography" being treated as "String", but the warning triggers warning mails every time a cronjob executes any rake task.

Any idea how I can silence this warning?

Thanks for your hints!

Answer 1

Looking at the source of ActiveRecord, I can answer the question myself:

The warning is hardcoded and therefore can't be silenced by AR configuration. However, RUBYOPT=-W0 gets rid of warnings altogether. This is a big chopper of course, but since I'm still getting those warnings in local development, I can live with a totally warning-less production system.

---

Update 2021:

After having updated the app to Rails 6.1, I got rid of this ugly hack and aliased the type properly in config/initializers/types.rb:

# (other custom types here)

# This application uses the PostGIS extension without the corresponding postgis
# adapter gem and therefore the "geography" type is unknown to ActiveRecord which
# causes a warning:
#
# unknown OID: failed to recognize type of 'geography'. It will be treated as String.
#
# The following silences this warning by explicitly aliasing "geography" to "text".
module PostgresGeographyExtension
  def load_additional_types(oids=nil)
    type_map.alias_type 'geography', 'text'
    super
  end
end
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::PostgreSQLAdapter.prepend PostgresGeographyExtension