I want to like this article because I agree with the overarching general statement that the ActiveRecord pattern is troublesome.

But it's... not very good. He constructed his own interface in order to complain about it, an interface which is so subptimal that it lets him complain about how bad it is as if the pattern was somehow to blame.

In most Active Record implementations I've seen, a Record is a live tuple ("Active" "Record") and you typically have some form of Repository ("Books" maybe in this example?) alongside of it which is responsible for carefully and optimally building the record objects.

The pattern itself says nothing about how to query things, it talks about a kind of DAO that has convenience methods to access and manipulate a tuple.

Also, what's with the REST rant? I don't think I understand how that's linked.