How to store and compare :symbols in an ActiveRecord (Ruby on Rails)

Question

I thought it would be good to populate a status field in an activeRecord table using constants. However, when it comes to checking if this status has a particular status, I\'m h

Answer 1

From Programming Ruby 1.9, regarding the == operator in the Symbol class (p. 729):

Returns true only if sym and obj are symbols with the same object_id.

Whatever you have stored in the DB will always have different object_id than the fixed object_id of the symbol (a pointer to a string literal, in this case).