I haven’t really used Sequel much therefore I am definitely a newbie. However, after days and nights of frustration, endless debugging and some search-fu during the development of Datamappify, I have finally arrived at the conclusion that Sequel is a capable library, as long as you are aware of the gotchas. Gotcha 1: Always use "select"/"select_all", or your data records will mysteriously have wrong IDs! In ActiveRecord, joining an associated model couldn’t be simpler: Post.joins(:author) ...