What is an active record?

Question

What exactly is an active record? I hear this term used in Ruby post and nhibernate.

Answer 1

Active record was initially a design pattern which involved wrapping database table operations in a class.

In a Rails context, however, it is also the proper name of a particular software component which implements the design pattern in Ruby for object-relational mapping, and the name of its associated module.

Answer 2

Active record is a design pattern where you map each table to a class. This means that each object created from this class represents a row in the table.

http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern