Active Record is a pattern used in software engineering that represents the database in an object-oriented manner. In other words, it’s a way to use objects to interact with a database instead of writing SQL queries directly.
In Ruby on Rails, Active Record is the default ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) that allows developers to define database tables as classes, and rows in those tables as objects. Active Record provides a lot of features such as validations, associations, and callbacks that make it easy to perform CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on the database.
For example, let’s say you have a “users” table in your database with columns for “id”, “name”, and “email”. In Active Record, you would define a “User” model class that inherits from the Active Record base class. The User model would have attributes for “id”, “name”, and “email”, and methods for performing CRUD operations such as creating a new user, finding a user by id, updating a user’s attributes, and deleting a user.
By using Active Record, you don’t have to write SQL queries directly, which can be error-prone and time-consuming. Instead, you can use object-oriented concepts like inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism to interact with the database. This makes it easier to write and maintain code and can speed up development time.
While Active Record provides a lot of benefits, it also has some disadvantages. Here are some of the disadvantages of Active Record:
Tight Coupling
Active Record is tightly coupled with the database schema, which means that any changes to the database schema may require corresponding changes to the Active Record models
Limited Flexibility
Active Record has a limited set of features and functionality, which may not be sufficient for complex applications. While it provides an easy way to perform CRUD operations, it may not be flexible enough to handle complex queries or data transformations.
SQL Knowledge
Active Record abstracts away the complexity of SQL queries, but it may require developers to have a good understanding of SQL to optimize queries and avoid performance issues.
Performance Issues
Active Record can have performance issues, because it fetch high number of data set as it will loads the dataset into the memory.
