It's got a very helpful transaction block wrapper structure that allows you to do some really interesting things with database transactions.
To be perfectly honest, one of the things that I always love about Rails is exactly how good the database layer is with ActiveRecord. I like using the advanced features of my database, especially PostgreSQL, and I've found that it's really easy to do with Rails.
The "Scopes" feature of active record that let's you save small snippets of a query and chain them together is fantastic. I've used it to create complex filter functions that combine full text search and coordinate distance as simple methods that can be attached to any query.
Being able to add a `.search("fender").distance_from(location, 5, :miles)` onto any query made my life so much easier.
It's been a few years, but I wrote about some of my favorites.
Rails has support for database transactions, but depending on what you want to do, things won't be magically transactional all by themselves (that said, it's really just a matter of wrapping transactional code in a block).
There are a couple of footguns in Rails involving transactions - by default, validating uniqueness of a column in Rails will be done at the app layer which is prone to race conditions, and with a typical CRUD model for an application, there's nothing in particular preventing overwrites of model data if say, a field was present on a form and two people were editing it, even if the "later" editor made no changes to that particular field.
When multiple systems and things other than databases (or multiple databases) are involved, you're generally on your own as well.
It's important to say that these footguns are not exclusive to Rails. I don't know a single web framework which avoids them - if it exists I'd like to know so I can learn how they do it.
Elixir's Ecto has the best solution to this problem in my experience--it doesn't do database validations on things like uniqueness, but provides easy error handling when constraints are hit.
It encourages you to write validations for things that don't need to hit the DB, but actually uses the DB for handling constraints, since it's the real source of truth for data consistency.
Most CRUD applications go the one extra step of putting a uniqueness constraint on the column instead of just relying on the app layer validation, and comparing hidden time stamps on the form if multiple people might edit the same row simultaneously. It’s exceedingly straightforward.
Did you really think thousands of web apps up to and including GitHub and shopify were squeaking by on blind luck? If basic database transactions and integrity weren’t doable in Rails, that’d have had to have been fixed years ago.
Most of your basic questions are covered by the starter Rails Guide for ActiveRecord, eg) transactions, validations, how to add a uniqueness constraint to the DB in a migration
