At the recent Canada on Rails conference Robby Russel introduced his upcoming plugin, Acts as legacy. Facing a 60+ table legacy system, I will definitely be watching that space. Acts_as_legacy would allow me to not worry about our existing scripts and jobs, while still rolling BiQ onto the rails.
For now, though, I am still partial to the idea of changing my tables around. Mainly to spare my poor fingers from having to type out stuff like intRelationValueRelation when building queries. relation_id makes so much more sense.
Decisions decisions.
In acts_as_legacy... there is a column_alias option.
class FooBar < AR::Base acts_as_legacy :table_name => 'foo_bar', :primary_key => 'foo_bar_id' column_alias :intRelationValueRelation, :relation_id endRobby, thanks for chiming in. I realize acts_as_legacy does that, but I am still considering the option of changing my scheme around to fit better with Rails. Seeing how I have full control of the DB and I'd like to move it from being an integration database to an application database governed by Rails, this seems to be the best way to go.
But I am thinking using acts_as_legacy is by far the simplest thing that could possibly work so I am partial to that at the moment. Changing stuff around can happen eventually when I have migrations and a testing framework in place to detect possible breakage.