whatevs.rb

# This is for an address book-like app. 
# Do people ever associate nested objects with the very top object to 
# Make sure that the nested object can never be seen by anybody besides
# the User/Owner? Basically, this is so I wouldn't have to go through 
# person to find the owner of a piece of data. 

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :people, foreign_key: :owner_id
  has_many :addresses # thinking about adding this
end

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :owner, class_name: 'User'
end

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person
  belongs_to :owner, class_name: 'User' # and adding this
end

This pattern has a further benefit: if you ever end up sharding your database (on User here), you're already nearly there since everything that belongs to the user will have a user_id.