title: When using rails/activerecord to talk to a MySQL database, can I set max_allowed_packet?
body: <p>MySQL has a <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/packet-too-large.html" rel="nofollow">setting called 'max_allowed_packet'</a> which is set separately for clients and servers.  On the server side it's in a config file, is it possible to set this to a non-default value on the client side when the client is rails ActiveRecord? </p>