David Masover
7/26/2008 4:31:00 AM
On Wednesday 23 July 2008 08:02:37 Anthony Eden wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:56 AM, David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com> 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).
>
> Eh? ActiveRecord is tightly tied to SQL.
Yes... Maybe I was being too bold.
However, ActiveRecord seems to be written from the perspective of hiding SQL
from the user. It's there if you need it, but for a lot of the concepts, it's
an implementation detail.
The structure of STI and polymorphism in Rails suggests that there might at
least be SQL-like databases targeting ActiveRecord in the future.
> Additionally BigTable and SimpleDB are not document
> databases.
They do seem to follow the same idea, though, and BigTable is certainly used
like one.
My point was that at least some parts of the community seem to embrace the
idea of a document database as a way to scale. And yes, it requires replacing
ActiveRecord -- but ActionPack should still be useful.