Why does Rails 3 with Mysql2 Gem ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute(sql) return Array not Hash?

Question

I\'m in the process of upgrading an application to Rails 3. I\'ve decided to go with the mysql2 gem. There\'s some legacy code in the app that makes calls like:

Answer 1

instead of

result = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute(sql)

do

results = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.exec_query(sql)

And that'll do exactly what you want. In particular,

results.first

will be a hash, and so on.

Thanks to @_fx for figuring this out!

For more, see http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/ConnectionAdapters/Mysql2Adapter.html#method-i-exec_query