Any way to store instance of ActiveRecord as a string in database

Greetings, I was wondering if any one had a suggestion for how I should approach a problem:

I am interested in storing an instance of ActiveRecord as a string in a database and reconstituting or converting it back into ActiveRecord at a later time-basically capturing the object in a database, but not as a database row in the traditional sense.

I can do this by storing the attributes of the instance in the database and later iterating through them, but I was hoping that I could basically serialize the entire object, store it in the db, and recall it later to reap the benefits of ActiveRecord.

Thanks in advance.

David

thanks shai david