Now that we've covered object relationships and ORMs, we will introduce Active Record. Active Record is an ORM - it does the same sort of tasks we learned about previously with ORMs. Using Active Record, just like using an ORM, can make fetching and representing data easier. Using Active Record saves us the trouble of writing our own custom ORMs.

Active Record gives us a few features. In this section we will discuss:

• The Active Record conventions and why programmers use them
• Active Record query methods
• Using Active Record to create a table

In the next several lessons, we'll learn how to build tables with Active Record, where properties and relationships of the objects in an application are stored and retrieved from a database without writing SQL statements.