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I had to use ActiveRecord last week after a year straight of using SQLalchemy and it was downright painful. doing anything beyond simple CRUD is near-impossible without writing raw SQL. i used to like ActiveRecord more when I didn't understand relational databases, but now I don't understand how anyone who's ever used SQL directly in their life could tolerate AR.

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ActiveRecord supports lots of stuff through arel (https://github.com/rails/arel).

Are you sure you understood how to use the full functionality? What was missing (besides CTEs)?

maybe this has changed, but arel's documentation last time i used it was about as good as the rails documentation, so it was wildly incomplete/inaccurate.

for example, last week I wanted to a bulk INSERT. maybe arel can do this (though I highly suspect it cannot since this isn't a part of relational algebra at all), but that's kind of worthless if i can't find any evidence of how to do it without reading the arel source.

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