# ActiveRecord Gets Some Love
If you’ve ever tried to extend ActiveRecord in a way that impacts its handling of columns you probably just gave up and didn’t bother.
Hopefully the first in a series of patches to sort this out, we have Changeset 7315 – AR no longer repeatedly parses the actual column data when you use it, so you should see some performance benefit especially if what you’re doing is date-heavy.
Further requests, if anyone is listening :
- When you update a model, only issue an UPDATE which updates the columns that have changed. This would stop breakage when a table has a column AR doesn’t support (As well as possibly giving some performance benefit.)
- Make it easy to add support for column types that AR doesn’t support out of the box.
UPDATE: Seems like someone is working on exactly this – Read here.