From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-07-23T23:31:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and RDBS

On Jul 22, 2008, at 11:56 PM, David Masover wrote:

> On Tuesday 22 July 2008 23:45:15 Thilanka Marasinghe wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to learn ruby and want to am into database and data mining
>> development and am curious if I could combine both together
>
> The Rails community seems to want to avoid writing any SQL at all,  
> and would
> rather work with document databases (things like ThruDB, SimpleDB, and
> BigTable).

I hear comments like this a lot, but I don't really understand where  
they are coming from.

ActiveRecord, the ORM layer of Rails, is capable of dropping down to  
whatever level of SQL you need.  Many of the features added to it over  
time have been to use SQL more heavily for various advantages.  Take  
"Eager Loading," for example.

I program in Rails all day every day and if you removed all the SQL I  
use, I would be much worse at it.

James Edward Gray II