Rails will change the `not` behavior

Yay Rails will change the behavior of the ActiveRecord#not on rails 6.1. That's great as the current behavior sometimes leads to confusion. There will be a deprecation message on the version 6.0 so let's watch out and change our code accordingly.

As I already wrote on this TIL this function does not act as a legit boolean algebra negation. Let's say that we have this query:

User.where.not(active: true, admin: true).to_sql

Prior to this change this will produce this query:

SELECT users.*
  FROM users
 WHERE users.active != 't'
   AND users.admin != 't'

The problem is that negating an AND clause is naturally a NAND operator, but Rails have implemented as a NOR. Some developers might wonder why regular active users are not returning.

On Rails 6.1 this will be fixed hence the new query will be:

SELECT users.*
  FROM users
 WHERE users.active != 't'
    OR users.admin != 't'

Here's the rollout plan:

• Rails 5.2.3 acts as NOR
• Rails 6.0.0 acts as NOR with a deprecation message
• Rails 6.1.0 act as NAND

This is the PR in case you want to know more.