So if I understand correctly, rails quotes names in the generated SQL quote and has the convention to provide them in lower case in ruby code. Well, then that's the how it is and the db (except postgres) still treat them as upper case. So I conclude using rails to create a table `"foo"` and then using plain SQL to query it without quoting the name `select * from foo` would fail. (I may be confused and unquoted names are treated as upper case instead of quoted ones, but the result would be the same failure).