ActiveRecord and SQL Server

I was having a really frustrating problem in that long-running queries to a (MS) SQL Server database were resulting in a TimeoutError being raised. After much research I determined that the issue was with the ADO driver's CommandTimeout property. It needed to be set to be much higher. From circumstantial evidence, it seemed to timeout after 30 seconds.

Setting that property via ActiveRecord was tricky. The property can be set directly against the underlying DBI database handle object. That object can be gotten at through the ActiveRecord::Base.connection object.

The name of my ActiveRecord model is IDX. So, I set the timeout with:
IDX.connection.instance_variable_get(:@connection).handle.instance_variable_get(:@handle).setproperty('CommandTimeout', 7200)
That works but, are you kidding me?!

Credit goes to the author of the blog at http://www.enterpriseetc.com/post/Ruby-in-Practice.aspx. His update at the very end ultimately pointed me in the right direction.