Active Record is the M in [MVC](getting_started.html#the-mvc-architecture) - the model - which is the layer of the system responsible for representing business data and logic. Active Record facilitates the creation and use of business objects whose data requires persistent storage to a database. It is an implementation of the Active Record pattern which itself is a description of an Object Relational Mapping system.
Active Record was described by Martin Fowler in his book _Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture_. In Active Record, objects carry both persistent data and behavior which operates on that data. Active Record takes the opinion that ensuring data access logic is part of the object will educate users of that object on how to write to and read from the database.
Object-Relational Mapping, commonly referred to as its abbreviation ORM, is a technique that connects the rich objects of an application to tables in a relational database management system. Using ORM, the properties and relationships of the objects in an application can be easily stored and retrieved from a database without writing SQL statements directly and with less overall database access code.
When writing applications using other programming languages or frameworks, it may be necessary to write a lot of configuration code. This is particularly true for ORM frameworks in general. However, if you follow the conventions adopted by Rails, you'll need to write very little configuration (in some case no configuration at all) when creating Active Record models. The idea is that if you configure your applications in the very same way most of the times then this should be the default way. In this cases, explicit configuration would be needed only in those cases where you can't follow the conventions for any reason.
By default, Active Record uses some naming conventions to find out how the mapping between models and database tables should be created. Rails will pluralize your class names to find the respective database table. So, for a class `Book`, you should have a database table called *books*. The Rails pluralization mechanisms are very powerful, being capable to pluralize (and singularize) both regular and irregular words. When using class names composed of two or more words, the model class name should follow the Ruby conventions, using the CamelCase form, while the table name must contain the words separated by underscores. Examples:
* *Foreign keys* - These fields should be named following the pattern `singularized_table_name_id` (e.g., `item_id`, `order_id`). These are the fields that Active Record will look for when you create associations between your models.
* *Primary keys* - By default, Active Record will use an integer column named `id` as the table's primary key. When using [Rails Migrations](migrations.html) to create your tables, this column will be automatically created.
*`(table_name)_count` - Used to cache the number of belonging objects on associations. For example, a `comments_count` column in a `Post` class that has many instances of `Comment` will cache the number of existent comments for each post.
NOTE: While these column names are optional, they are in fact reserved by Active Record. Steer clear of reserved keywords unless you want the extra functionality. For example, `type` is a reserved keyword used to designate a table using Single Table Inheritance (STI). If you are not using STI, try an analogous keyword like "context", that may still accurately describe the data you are modeling.
This will create a `Product` model, mapped to a `products` table at the database. By doing this you'll also have the ability to map the columns of each row in that table with the attributes of the instances of your model. Suppose that the `products` table was created using an SQL sentence like:
What if you need to follow a different naming convention or need to use your Rails application with a legacy database? No problem, you can easily override the default conventions.
If you do so, you will have to define manually the class name that is hosting the fixtures (class_name.yml) using the `set_fixture_class` method in your test definition:
CRUD is an acronym for the four verbs we use to operate on data: *C*reate, *R*ead, *U*pdate and *D*elete. Active Record automatically creates methods to allow an application to read and manipulate data stored within its tables.
Active Record objects can be created from a hash, a block or have their attributes manually set after creation. The `new` method will return a new object while `create` will return the object and save it to the database.
For example, given a model `User` with attributes of `name` and `occupation`, the `create` method call will create and save a new record into the database:
Active Record provides a rich API for accessing data within a database. Below are a few examples of different data access methods provided by Active Record.
Active Record allows you to validate the state of a model before it gets written into the database. There are several methods that you can use to check your models and validate that an attribute value is not empty, is unique and not already in the database, follows a specific format and many more. You can learn more about validations in the [Active Record Validations and Callbacks guide](active_record_validations_callbacks.html#validations-overview).
Active Record callbacks allow you to attach code to certain events in the life-cycle of your models. This enables you to add behavior to your models by transparently executing code when those events occur, like when you create a new record, update it, destroy it and so on. You can learn more about callbacks in the [Active Record Validations and Callbacks guide](active_record_validations_callbacks.html#callbacks-overview).
Rails provides a domain-specific language for managing a database schema called migrations. Migrations are stored in files which are executed against any database that Active Record support using rake. Rails keeps track of which files have been committed to the database and provides rollback features. You can learn more about migrations in the [Active Record Migrations guide](migrations.html)