Rails, Databases, ActiveRecord and the path towards damnation

The last two days I've spent some thought on databases and Rails. I haven't gotten far, but I do know that Rails have serious trouble with regard to databases. Some of this thinking comes from David Blacks talk, other parts from DHH's rant after the panel discussion, and some from discussions with other Rubyists and Railites.

So. What are these problems? The first one is MySQL. Now, I don't want to bash MySQL. Not really. But it is not a good database. Until recently it's been very bad on SQL compliance. It's slow. It's cumbersome. The foreign keys are annoyingly incomplete. And some MySQL-extensions have a tendency to be preached as gospel by people who doesn't understand databases. (But I guess this isn't really the fault of MySQL). Actually, the worst part with MySQL is that ActiveRecord have been designed based on it. Now, I really do understand 37signals point of view on this. Of course, if MySQL is good for them, I understand that they have built that support in deep. But this puts the rest of the world using Rails in a tight spot. It is incredibly hard to get other databases working with Rails, and even if you do get them working, it will be slow. Really slow. Take Oracle. Oracle lives and dies by prepared statements. But there is no sane way to do this in Rails. Instead, SQL is generated dynamically and Ruby code is used to quote variables instead of doing this as part of the prepared statement. This is obviously very much painful when doing the JDBC adapter, but it is really important for all serious databases. Having prepared statements would also cut down on much of the database specific code in Active Record, since quoting would be up to the database driver, as it should be.

OK, problem number two. Real world database design. As Black has noticed, this isn't talked about in the Rails community. At all. Of course, as one person in the audience noted, this is partly since using ActiveRecord and designing your objects with care results in 3rd normal form without effort, but this is not the whole story. There are much more important issues in database engineering than normalization, and lets face it, most Rails developers produce pretty crappy databases. This needs to be investigated, talked about, discussed. It needs to come out into the open. This discussion is needed for many reasons. I want to be able to use Rails for all applications where it makes sense. But most of those places won't be possible until the database support doesn't kill Oracle when trying to use it. Or requires a database with no good management tools.