ActiveRecord isn't really an ORM. It's a way of building queries against relational data, and associating some methods with the tuples you get back (which might

ActiveRecord isn't really an ORM. It's a way of building queries against relational data, and associating some methods with the tuples you get back (which might not even be full rows). It also has a bit of support for C, U and D, but it's strongest in R. Although many queries won't fit in its model, it's trivial to inject snippets of SQL where needed. What it is not is a way of mapping databases to models. The models pretty directly model the database, rather than the other way around. Quite different to something like JPA.