It's beneficial to point out that ActiveRecord is no longer tied to the hip of Rails. In fact, in Rails 3, you now have ActiveModel which gives you all the "Act

It's beneficial to point out that ActiveRecord is no longer tied to the hip of Rails. In fact, in Rails 3, you now have ActiveModel which gives you all the "Active" goodness of model objects without connecting to a specific database at all. In other words, issues like this are no longer a problem in Rails, maybe just in certain modules you can install and use optionally in Rails.