I am using Rails 2.3.5 and in that if I give Model.find(1) and if 1 is not in the database, it returns ActiveRecord error. Should it just be returning nil as in the case of Model.find_by_column('..')?
This is the expected behavior. I think David explains this the best himself, so here is a quote from Ruby, S., Thomas, D. & Hansson, D.H., 2009. Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition Third Edition., Pragmatic Bookshelf (p.330).
When you use a finder driven by primary keys, you’re looking for a particular record. You expect it to exist. A call to Person.find(5) is based on our knowledge of the people table. We want the row with an id of 5. If this call is unsuccessful—if the record with the id of 5 has been destroyed—we’re in an exceptional situation. This mandates the raising of an exception, so Rails raises RecordNotFound.
On the other hand, finders that use criteria to search are looking for a match. So, Person.find(:first, :conditions=>"name=’Dave’") is the equivalent of telling the database (as a black box) “Give me the first person row that has the name Dave.” This exhibits a distinctly different approach to retrieval; we’re not certain up front that we’ll get a result. It’s entirely possible the result set may be empty. Thus, returning nil in the case of finders that search for one row and an empty array for finders that search for many rows is the natural, nonexceptional response.