A good analysis of Rail’s implementation of Active Record. His measure is that it’s the “Visual basic of Object Relation Mapping,” and he sums it up nicely with:

Given that Ruby fans like the idea of domain specific languages, which let you work in a super high level language customized to the problem domain, it’s surprising that Rails groupthink is that SQL is bad. It’s actually a very high level language, and allows a well written database to do some pretty amazing optimization on the fly because it provides a strong layer of abstraction between what you requested and how the storage engine provides it.

I think that if Rails switched from their Ruby-based ActiveRecord to something based in SQL, that it would be a damned tempting framework. But as it stands, I’m not sure I want to wrestle with ActiveRecord to do what I can do in SQL quickly and clearly already.