I strongly recommend Sequel for Ruby: http://sequel.rubyforge.org http://sequel.rubyforge.org It provides an ActiveModel-compliant interface, so it works fine

I strongly recommend Sequel for Ruby: http://sequel.rubyforge.org http://sequel.rubyforge.org It provides an ActiveModel-compliant interface, so it works fine with Rails. It also has a lot less magic (associations don't use proxy objects, for example) and has a lot of features that ActiveRecord is sorely missing (such as complete support for composite primary keys). I don't know what your other problems with ActiveRecord are, but Sequel is definitely worth a look. I'm very happy with it.