Open / Close Connection

So I'm introducing Rails to my workplace (enterprise! woo woo), and I'm nearly finished with my first application. Because we're using SQL Server, I'm now getting zombie state errors.

Then I saw this post: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/220840

Here's my confession, I'm developing on Vista using SQL Server to deploy to Windows Server 2008 using IIS. So I know I'm already totally off the Rails way. It seem like any other application using SQL Server (not including Rails) opens and closes the connection for individual transactions. The post I linked to earlier is a guy who does exactly that. My question is, what's the easiest and/or most correct way to open and close the connection manually?