Help with accessing DB for general purpose on Active Record

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I'm converting data from a db to another. It's kinda complex migration. I need to merge some tables into one and change some column values by rules.

I want to use ActiveRecord instead of DBI (For some reason, on my ubuntu box, DBI for MySql doesn't work.) Modeling is not important here. And I don't want to define all models for every table (more than 800 tables). I just want to use my sql statements for retrieval and update (select/ insert/update...). So basically, I'm not taking advantage of ActiveRecord. I'm just using it as DB interface.

Through some research, I figured out how to retrieve data.

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(...) rows = ActiveRecord::Base.find_by_sql("select * from table1") rows.each do |row|   hash = row.attributes_before_type_cast   ... end

In this way, row.attributes didn't work but attributes_before_type_cast did.

Question 1: Is there a way to make row.attributes work? And for better, how can I make row.col_name work?

Question 2: How can I use insert/update statement? For example, ActiveRecord::Base.insert_by_sql("insert into...")

I googled it already but couldn't find good examples.

Thanks.

Sam