Do you agree that as some point, every (big enough) Rails app sould not rely only on ActiveRecord?

Hi.

I’ve just read an interview of the CTO of Gowalla where they use Ruby
and
Rails: Ruby on Rails: Scaling Your App for Rapid Growth | Mashable
He says:

Every Rails app that Ive ever worked on has had to break away from the
ActiveRecord way at some point, for some part of the app. But its not an
all-or-nothing question. Most of the time, the standard
relational/ActiveRecord approach works perfectly well, and the
convenience
of following the Rails golden path is completely worthwhile. But most
interesting apps will run into at least a few points where the standard
tools break down, and you need to access your data differently.

What do you think?

On 24 February 2011 08:19, Michel P. [email protected] wrote:

Hi.
I’ve just read an interview of the CTO of Gowalla where they use Ruby and
Rails:

What do you think?

What’s to disagree with? Who on Earth would ever claim “ActiveRecord
is all you’ll ever need”?

Like it says “Most of the time, the standard relational/ActiveRecord
approach works perfectly well [but] apps will run into at least a few
points where the standard tools break down”
Who hasn’t had to do do at least one find_by_sql to do some
cross-tabbing in the DB to save processing time?

He does not say that AR own methods are not enough, he says that an app
needs to be based on AR and other other tool that are them selves based
on
NoSQL.

On 24 February 2011 09:24, Michel P. [email protected] wrote:

He does not say that AR own methods are not enough, he says that an app
needs to be based on AR and other other tool that are them selves based on
NoSQL.

And I still agree with him/the quote.
What’s to disagree with it? Do you think he might be wrong in his
assertion?

It’s not that I don’t agree, I just don’t have an opinion on this matter
and
asking for thoughts :slight_smile:
Why Rails with a SQL db would not be enough to always scale an app?

On Feb 24, 5:09am, Michel P. [email protected] wrote:

It’s not that I don’t agree, I just don’t have an opinion on this matter and
asking for thoughts :slight_smile:
Why Rails with a SQL db would not be enough to always scale an app?

The quotation does not claim that. What it says is that the
ActiveRecord ORM does not handle every situation well. Which can be
said of Ruby (or any other language, methodology, persistence store,
religious belief, etc.) for that matter.

Always use the best tool for the job. The evolution and scaling of
Twitter
is a good example of
this:

Thank you all for your answers. Tricon your link seems interresting,
I’ll
read it tomorrow, thanks :wink:

Hello,

I highly reccomend you DataMapper http://datamapper.org
because its code is beautiful,
have a helpful community http://groups.google.com/group/datamapper
you can immediately change Rails’ ORM with this adapter
GitHub - datamapper/dm-rails: Integrate DataMapper with Rails 3

Also you may give a try for NoSQL:
MongoDB or CouchDB

There is not The Best DB and also not any Best ORM for sure. Depends
on your needs. Maybe ActiveRecord has smthg with foreign keys but Rein
gem can solve this issue as I heard(haven’t used since I’m fun of DM):

cheers,
Zoli