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DB2 on Rails at RailsConf: Day One - Dave Thomas's keynote

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Leon Katsnelson

Posts: 105
Nickname: db2onrails
Registered: Jun, 2006

Leon Katsnelson is a Program Director at the IBM Toronto Lab working on spreading the joy of DB2.

DB2 on Rails at RailsConf: Day One - Dave Thomas's keynote

Posted: Jun 24, 2006 2:59 PM

This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Leon Katsnelson.
Original Post: DB2 on Rails at RailsConf: Day One - Dave Thomas's keynote Feed Title: DB2 on Rails Feed URL: http://db2onrails.com/blog/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: DB2 on Rails is a blog maintained by the IBM team working on DB2 enablement for Ruby on Rails.	Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Leon Katsnelson Latest Posts From DB2 on Rails

Dave Thomas opened the conference with his keynote and it absolutely struck the right cord with me. His message was both blunt and simple: "For Ruby on Rails to succeed i.e. to gain much wider adoption it must embrace legacy i.e. the stuff that already exists." Given the fact that I spend all of my time in the enterprise, I could not agree more. Dave talked about 3 challenges but the one that I really resonated with me (the all did) the challenge of embracing data integration. Active Record is an incredibly elegant piece of technology. The value that derives form DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) can not be overstated. But Active Record fails to exploit constraints that are already defined in most databases. In a typical enterprise application you will have data architects and DBAs spend significant effort to define constraints on the data that reflect real world business rules. So why is it that that the framework that espouses to live and die by the principle of DRY makes programmers respecify these constraints in the Active Record instead of just using what has already been specified in the database? It just makes sense for Active Record to build validations from the constraints that are defined in the database. This would take Rails from "elegant" to "brilliant". I do not mean any disrespect towards the Rails programmers, they really are cream of the crop ... but in an enterprise application you simply will not have all of the information to do all of the validations to enforce all of the business rules and constraints. Not over a span of many years (decades) that the application will stay in production. One thing that is true about data gathered by successful applications is that is always accessed by other applications. This is why enterprise class database systems define and enforce constraints in the database. Given that their job is to is ensure data integrity no matter which application they serve, how can they not? I really hope that RoR community heads Dave Thomas's call and makes Active Record really brilliant.

Read: DB2 on Rails at RailsConf: Day One - Dave Thomas's keynote

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