What do you think about adding update_each and update_each! to ActiveRecord?
Basically it would make it easier to switch from update_all but triggering the callbacks (and could be later optimized, where each { |m| m.update(...) } is very difficult to optimize from the Rails-side.
A simple implementation could be:
class ActiveRecord::Base
def self.update_each(updates)
find_each { |model| model.update(updates) }
end
def self.update_each!(updates)
find_each { |model| model.update!(updates) }
end
end