Open / Close Connection

So I’m introducing Rails to my workplace (enterprise! woo woo), and
I’m nearly finished with my first application. Because we’re using SQL
Server, I’m now getting zombie state errors.

Then I saw this post:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/220840

Here’s my confession, I’m developing on Vista using SQL Server to
deploy to Windows Server 2008 using IIS. So I know I’m already totally
off the Rails way. It seem like any other application using SQL
Server (not including Rails) opens and closes the connection for
individual transactions. The post I linked to earlier is a guy who
does exactly that. My question is, what’s the easiest and/or most
correct way to open and close the connection manually?