Usage

So, you want to use your first flex column? Here are the steps:

Pick (or add) a column to use as your flex column. This can be called anything (although watch out for the reasonably obvious name of "attributes"; it's reserved by ActiveRecord and weird, weird errors will result). This can be of any textual type (CHAR, VARCHAR, TEXT, CLOB), in which case you'll get pure JSON in your column, or of a binary type (BINARY, VARBINARY, BLOB), in which case you'll get a small header (FC:01,0, or similar) in front of your data, followed by UTF8-encoded JSON. If you're using PostgreSQL, you can also use its native JSON data type, in which case you'll get pure JSON, too.

In the model class for that table, declare a flex column with any fields you want, like so:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  flex_column :user_attributes do
    field :foo
    field :bar
  end
end

You're all ready to go.