I Thought Rails Was Meant To Be Productive…

Why is it that a hugely database dependent framework, that’s meant to be extremely quick to get up and running with is so infuriating when it comes to get it actually talking to the database? I know cross-language interfaces are always difficult, particularly when you try to make them work cross platform but if I can get Java, PHP and perl all talking to MySQL easily, why does it have to be so damn hard for ruby?

Perhaps more importantly, why the heck do I need to? Developer time is meant to be sacred, so why isn’t there a pure ruby embedded database that comes with rails? Why do I have to fight with the MySQL bindings before I can start developing, why do I have to configure where my database is and provide three separate configurations for testing, development and production? Why can’t Rails just do it for me? Sure I probably don’t want to develop my entire application on an embedded database and then hope it all works when I go live on something that can scale better, but at the same time, do I really need to go through configuration hell before I can do anything with Rails?

I think I’m really starting to appreciate the value of Apache Derby.