Also our Ruby engineers liked the flexibility so much that they exposed our entire database as a service to customers, which we had to emulate and support.
Two sides to every position.
It's great if your users are disciplined and experienced Rails engineers who understand how the system works, but we don't live in fantasy land and a year later, we are so very constrained by the unlimited DB access that we're rewriting it all and leaving ActiveRecord out of the equation.
I'll always maintain that Rails is the first tool I'd reach for in a new web startup, and the first one I'd discard after growing past ~20 engineers.
I'm continuously shocked at how much bad ActiveRecord code there is lying around given that it's so easy to just look at the SQL it generates and be like "yeah this looks reasonable".
WHY SPONGEBOB WHY!?! Why do you pass around your relations making all of ActiveRecord part of your external API? It's so hard to do stupid things with AR if you pretend that AR objects can't leave the scope they were fetched in.
ActiveRecord is the least of your problems, then... seems like you may have a fundamental problem of inexperienced or foolish devs.
Our Tcl ORM was doing Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, Informix, Oracle and even Access, across Windows 2000/NT, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, in 1999 - 2002.
But we never went big into US, so Rails gets the credits.
And we were not alone in this regard, there was Vignette, Cold Fusion, Zope,...
