This is the expected behavior. I think David explains this the best himself, so here is a quote from Ruby, S., Thomas, D. & Hansson, D.H., 2009. Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition Third Edition., Pragmatic Bookshelf (p.330).
When you use a finder driven by
primary keys, you’re looking for a
particular record. You expect it to
exist. A call to Person.find(5) is
based on our knowledge of the people
table. We want the row with an id of
5. If this call is unsuccessful—if the record with the id of 5 has been
destroyed—we’re in an exceptional
situation. This mandates the raising
of an exception, so Rails raises
RecordNotFound.On the other hand,
finders that use criteria to search
are looking for a match. So,
Person.find(:first,
:conditions=>”name=’Dave’”) is the
equivalent of telling the database (as
a black box) “Give me the first person
row that has the name Dave.” This
exhibits a distinctly different
approach to retrieval; we’re not certain up front that we’ll get a result.
It’s entirely possible the result set
may be empty. Thus, returning nil in
the case of finders that search for
one row and an empty array for finders
that search for many rows is the
natural, nonexceptional response.