Pro Active Record helps you take advantage of the full power of your database engine from within your Ruby programs and Rails applications. ActiveRecord, part of the magic that makes the Rails framework so powerful and easy to use, is the model element of the Rails Model-View-Controller framework. It's an object-relational mapping library enabling you to interact with databases from both Ruby and Rails applications.

Because ActiveRecord is configured with default assumptions that mesh perfectly with the Rails framework, Rails developers often find they hardly need think about...