Among the three of us, we have a pretty fair bit of experience in applying Active Record
to the problem of legacy databases. In our work with clients, we often find ourselves writing
ad-hoc Ruby scripts using Active Record to manage various client databases or to perform
various incidental tasks. Whether it??™s pulling data from an Oracle database for a Ferret indexing
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script for Reviews.com, pulling and pushing content from an MS SQL Server database for
the SportsXchange, or doing simple data manipulation and calculations in a local MySQL
instance, we can now do it all in Ruby with the Active Record library.
However, the steps it took us to get to this comfort level opened our eyes to the fact that
there is no real, centralized source of Active Record information. We had to piece together
what??™s in this book over time by collecting tips, playing with code, using trial and error, and
digging through all the source code line by line. While we didn??™t mind the work (and we got
lots of help from the Ruby community), we thought it would be selfish not to share our newfound
experience and knowledge with everyone else and hopefully save a few of you some
time.
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