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: