Rails - Apr 2005 - Multiple DB connections - is this a good idea?

Hello all

I took a different approach than what is outlined in this howto:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/HowtoUseMultipleDatabases

I created a new class in my application.rb that looks like this:

class ForeignDistPlan < ActiveRecord::Base
end

and then from within a method (in the default model class):

arrayOfHashes = ForeignDistPlan.connection.select_all
("#{connectionString}")

This gets the results I need from the secondary database, and all my subsequent
calls the the default model class connect to the default databse without any
problems so far.

THis is per the docs: http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html
under the title ''Connection to multiple databases in different
models''

Is this a bad idea?

Thank you for any input.

-Erin

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