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0 pointsp_l4y ago0 comments

Out of those, though, I have to blame document DBs (and the start of NoSQL craze) on Rails :(

To cut a long story short, Active Record (especially at the time) wasn't super keen on generating super good SQL that would do as much as possible in database, and Ruby 1.9 arrived with stable ordered hashes. Then someone implemented basic ActiveRecord wrapper on top of key/value store (I think it started with Berkeley DB or similar), and from there NoSQL was off to the races as "new hip thing"[1]

[1] Meanwhile IBM IMS has been selling pretty well for last 40 years at the time ;)

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2 comments · 2 top-level

LargeWu4y ago

ActiveRecord was, even then, a much better ORM than exists in the Node world today. It was full featured and well hardened, and required basically no setup other than a class declaration. Plus, you could always drop down to the SQL if you needed to. Generally, it was a joy to use, and the performance was usually good enough.

At some point, I gave up on even trying to use any Node ORM's because they were clunky and offered no value. It was easier to just drop straight to a knex session and write the queries natively.

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tinco4y ago

I don't fully understand your argument. Document DB's never fully got traction in the Rails community. Then Node.JS became popular because it did concurrent IO better, and it put document DB's front and center for no apparent reason.

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