Thanks for the article, though there is in my opinion a problem dealing with hstore is that when you store it in the database as hash. It's really hard to retrieve the object as hash because it will get back as a string with hashes inside it. So I need to evaluate the different hashes inside the "preferences" for example differently and use most of times 'eval' when I load the object again. Also defining attributes types will work for some types like boolean, but for other types like if 'newsletter' was of Hash[Symbol => Integer] type, calling user.preferences.newsletter.class will return a string and not HashClass.
Additionally that serializing using Virtus is just useful in this case in seperating the logic and avoid using store_accessor(Prevent user class from exposing what is inside the preferences hash). But when retrieving the object it will be considered as a normal hstore and I am not sure how virtus will be usefull.

In another word I find out when your hstore object get much complicated, like having nested hashes and arrays. I think It's better consider another solution !

Finally someone that explains how to query the VALUE of a hstore! Great stuff, thanks mate

How can I make a scopes instead of queries those queries?

I tried something like:
scope : newsletter, -> (x) { where preferences[: newsletter] x}

But I can't get it to work :/

Probably something like this:

scope :newsletter, lambda do |subscribed|
  where("preferences @> hstore('newsletter', ?)", subscribed.to_s)
end

I returns
tried to create Proc object without a block

Great writeup. Thank you very much!

One thing I noticed, if you are using schemas in PostgreSQL, you have to add the schema on the search path where the hstore extension is enabled in order to add columns with 'hstore' data type on other schemas.

Awesome

Thanks for the article,
I have one question.
how can i permit serialize :preferences, UserPreferences in controller