I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it shouldn't just be turned into a one-liner that shoves ARGV elements directly at the database, but should actually do some validation of input. Even your one-liner is safer than raw irb since you can't make a typo and call the wrong method, but if you add validation, then yes, I think it's much, much less destructive.
I suppose when the args are both allowed to be arbitrary strings, the validation is already done, and the escaping is done by AR, so you can safely pass them unmolested. It just triggers my safety reflex to send ARGV elements on to the next layer without doing something to them.
