ActiveRecord: unobtrusive ORM

While studying Ruby on Rails and looking for documentation I found this post by David Heinemeier Hansson
Addressing concerns with Active Record (Loud Thinking).

It explains some of the rationale behind the Active Record machinery and why it has been made so that you can do the easy thigs VERY easily while it is trivial to revert to sql for the most complex things. Qouting from the post:

Active Record shouldn’t give the expectation that you’ll never have to touch SQL again. That’s an illusion and many ORMs have been build and crumbled on that illusion.

This is something that I’ve come to understand while working on large java based projects using Oracle’s bc4j as the object relational mapping layer, when there is the need to present complex data the best option is to use the database tools which are built expressely to manage the data, and are optimized for these tasks: SQL, views and stored procedures. In such cases we would often revert to write custom queries into ViewObjects or let all the processing be done by some stored procedure (which was easly done also with bc4j!).