Confreaks

Arel (also known as ActiveRelation) is the Ruby relational algebra engine powering ActiveRecord in Rails 3. By replacing string concatenation with an object model to express SQL queries, Arel had a big immediate impact on the ActiveRecord codebase and opens the door for more powerful Object Relation Mapping (ORM) functionality in the future. This talk will introduce the concept of relational algebra, cover the past, present and future of Arel, and dive into how you can leverage it today either on its own, or in your Rails 3 applications.