The same is not true of `define_attribute`, which is meant to be the low
level no-magic API that sits underneath. The differences between the two
APIs are:

- `attribute`
  - Lazy (the attribute will be defined after the schema has loaded)
  - Allows either a type object or a symbol
- `define_attribute`
  - Runs immediately (might get trampled by schema loading)
  - Requires a type object

This was the last blocker in terms of public interface requirements
originally discussed for this feature back in May. All the
implementation blockers have been cleared, so this feature is probably
ready for release (pending one more look-over by me).

They are implementation details

Deprecated finders are not supported anymore

While we query the proper columns, we go through normal handling for
converting the value to a primitive which assumes it should use the
table's primary key. If the association specifies a different value (and
we know that we're working with an association), we should use the
custom primary key instead.

Fixes #18813.

The type from the column is never used, except when being passed to the
attributes API. While leaving the type on the column wasn't necessarily
a bad thing, I worry that it's existence there implies that it is
something which should be used.

During the design and implementation process of the attributes API,
there have been plenty of cases where getting the "right" type object
was hard, but I had easy access to the column objects. For any
contributor who isn't intimately familiar with the intents behind the
type casting system, grabbing the type from the column might easily seem
like the "correct" thing to do.

As such, the goal of this change is to express that the column is not
something that should be used for type casting. The only places that are
"valid" (at the time of this commit) uses of acquiring a type object
from the column are fixtures (as the YAML file is going to mirror the
database more closely than the AR object), and looking up the type
during schema detection to pass to the attributes API

Many of the failing tests were removed, as they've been made obsolete
over the last year. All of the PG column tests were testing nothing
beyond polymorphism. The Mysql2 tests were duplicating the mysql tests,
since they now share a column class.

The implementation is a little hairy, and slightly verbose, but it felt
preferable to going back to 20 constructor options for the columns. If
you are git blaming to figure out wtf I was thinking with them, and have
a better idea, go for it. Just don't use a type object for this.

The cache name should be converted to a string when given, not compared
as a symbol. This edge case is already adequately covered by our tests,
but was masked by another issue where we were incorrectly updating the
counter cache twice. When paired with a bug where we didn't update the
counter cache because we couldn't find a match with the name, this made
it look like everything was working fine.

Fixes #10865.

Fixes #18787.

`attributes_to_define_after_schema_loads` better describes the
difference between `attribute` and `define_attribute`, and doesn't
conflate terms since we no longer differentiate between "user provided"
and "schema provided" types.

Now that type casting has nothing to do with columns, our only usage of
this method is gone.

Fixes #17621. This 5 year old (or older) issue causes validations to fire
when a parent record has `validate: false` option and a child record is
saved. It's not the responsibility of the model to validate an
associated object unless the object was created or modified by the
parent.

Clean up tests related to validations

`assert_nothing_raised` is not benefiting us in these tests
Corrected spelling of "respects"
It's better to use `assert_not_operator` over `assert !r.valid`

Fix Issue #15549, unbounded memory growth when saving records that have any after_create callbacks (or any associations, which makes after_create callbacks for you)

the transaction object shouldn't know so much about active record
objects, so let's push the conditionals in to the instance.

The new association error belongs to Active Record, not Active Model.
See #18700 for reference.

ref https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8846

It's finally finished!!!!!!! The reason the Attributes API was kept
private in 4.2 was due to some publicly visible implementation details.
It was previously implemented by overloading `columns` and
`columns_hash`, to make them return column objects which were modified
with the attribute information.

This meant that those methods LIED! We didn't change the database
schema. We changed the attribute information on the class. That is
wrong! It should be the other way around, where schema loading just
calls the attributes API for you. And now it does!

Yes, this means that there is nothing that happens in automatic schema
loading that you couldn't manually do yourself. (There's still some
funky cases where we hit the connection adapter that I need to handle,
before we can turn off automatic schema detection entirely.)

There were a few weird test failures caused by this that had to be
fixed. The main source came from the fact that the attribute methods are
now defined in terms of `attribute_names`, which has a clause like
`return [] unless table_exists?`. I don't *think* this is an issue,
since the only place this caused failures were in a fake adapter which
didn't override `table_exists?`.

Additionally, there were a few cases where tests were failing because a
migration was run, but the model was not reloaded. I'm not sure why
these started failing from this change, I might need to clear an
additional cache in `reload_schema_from_cache`. Again, since this is not
normal usage, and it's expected that `reset_column_information` will be
called after the table is modified, I don't think it's a problem.

Still, test failures that were unrelated to the change are worrying, and
I need to dig into them further.

Finally, I spent a lot of time debugging issues with the mutex used in
`define_attribute_methods`. I think we can just remove that method
entirely, and define the attribute methods *manually* in the call to
`define_attribute`, which would simplify the code *tremendously*.

Ok. now to make this damn thing public, and work on moving it up to
Active Model.

This method doesn't need to be lazy, as it is never called from reads.
The only time it is called are in write cases, where we're about to loop
through the results of it, and build the attribute objects anyway. So we
don't gain anything by dodging the instantiation here. This is the only
method that coupled `AttributeSet` to `LazyAttributeHash`, so removing
it puts us back in a place where we can use a normal hash instead.

Remaining are `limit`, `precision`, `scale`, and `type` (the symbol
version). These will remain on the column, since they mirror the options
to the `column` method in the schema definition DSL

The goal is to remove the type object from the column, and remove
columns from the type casting process entirely. The primary motivation
for this is clarity. The connection adapter does not have sufficient
type information, since the type we want to work with might have been
overriden at the class level. By taking this object from the column,
it is easy to mistakenly think that the column object which exists on
the connection adapter is sufficient. It isn't.

A concrete example of this is `serialize`. In 4.2 and earlier, `where`
worked in a very inconsistent and confusing manner. If you passed a
single value to `where`, it would serialize it before querying, and do
the right thing. However, passing it as part of an array, hash, or range
would cause it to not work. This is because it would stop using prepared
statements, so the type casting would come from arel. Arel would have no
choice but to get the column from the connection adapter, which would
treat it as any other string column, and query for the wrong value.

There are a handful of cases where using the column object to find the
cast type is appropriate. These are cases where there is not actually a
class involved, such as the migration DSL, or fixtures. For all other
cases, the API should be designed as such that the type is provided
before we get to the connection adapter. (For an example of this, see
the work done to decorate the arel table object with a type caster, or
the introduction of `QueryAttribute` to `Relation`).

There are times that it is appropriate to use information from the
column to change behavior in the connection adapter. These cases are
when the primitive used to represent that type before it goes to the
database does not sufficiently express what needs to happen. An example
of this that affects every adapter is binary vs varchar, where the
primitive used for both is a string. In this case it is appropriate to
look at the column object to determine which quoting method to use, as
this is something schema dependent.

An example of something which would not be appropriate is to look at the
type and see that it is a datetime, and performing string parsing when
given a string instead of a date.  This is the type of logic that should
live entirely on the type. The value which comes out of the type should
be a sufficiently generic primitive that the adapter can be expected to
know how to work with it.

The one place that is still using the column for type information which
should not be necessary is the connection adapter type caster which is
sometimes given to the arel table when we can't find the associated
table. This will hopefully go away in the near future.

Collection associations would have already been validated, but singular
associations were not.

Fixes #18735.

Fixes #18717

All columns which would map to a string primitive need this behavior.
Binary has it's own marker type, so it won't go through this conversion.
String and text, which need this, will.

Fixes #18585.

    Post.where('id = 1').or(Post.where('id = 2'))
    # => SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (id = 1) OR (id = 2)

[Matthew Draper & Gael Muller]

These callbacks will already have been defined when the association was
built. The check against `reflection.autosave` happens at call time, not
at define time, so simply modifying the reflection is sufficient.

Fixes #18704

Fixes #18696.

`bound_attributes` is now used universally across the board, removing
the need for the conversion layer. These changes are mostly mechanical,
with the exception of the log subscriber. Additional, we had to
implement `hash` on the attribute objects, so they could be used as a
key for query caching.