I''m trying to clean up my Sybase adapter patch (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/3765) and I keep tripping over a puzzling hurdle. I can get all the unit tests to pass in stable and (with a few minor tweaks) in trunk, but in both cases I have to special-case the date assert in associations_test.rb for the following methods: test_additional_columns_from_join_table test_habtm_adding_before_save_with_join_attributes test_rich_association In each case, the joined_on field comes back as a String, not a Date. Can anyone give me a hint what might be causing this? I''d really like to remove the special-casing if I can. Thanks, John