When I started developing the Rails integration for Rodauth, one of the first problems I needed to solve was how to make Rodauth work seamlessly with Active Record, given that it uses Sequel for database interaction. I believed these two could coexist together, because Sequel is mostly hidden from the Rodauth user anyway, and all that really matters is that Rodauth’s SQL statements get executed on the database.

At work I was tasked to migrate our time-series analytics data from CSV file dumps that we’ve been feeding into Power BI to a dedicated database. Our Rails app’s primary database is currently MariaDB, but we wanted to have our analytics data in a separate database either way, so this was a good opportunity to use Postgres which we’re most comfortable with anyway.

At a previous company, I was working on an internal app for managing and distributing video content. Content curators would create playlists of videos, submit them for approval, and once playlists were approved they would be automatically published to target devices.

I’ve recently picked up the sequel-activerecord_connection gem again to make some reliability improvements around database transactions. For context, this gem extends Sequel with the ability to reuse Active Record’s database connection, which should lower the barrier for trying out Sequel in apps that use Active Record.

I’ve recently started working on a new project which uses Sequel, and it reminded me how much I love it. For those who don’t know, Sequel is a superb alternative to Active Record. I wrote a gentle introduction to Sequel a while back.

For those who don’t know, Sequel is an ORM very similar to ActiveRecord, in a way that it also implements the Active Record pattern. As of this writing it’s 9 years old. I’ve already written about some of the main advantages of Sequel over ActiveRecord (and other people have as well: 1, 2).

I’ve used and loved ActiveRecord for most of my Ruby life. While I was in Rails, I couldn’t imagine why I would want to use anything else. When I moved away from Rails, I was still using ActiveRecord at first, but some things started to bother me: