That's what I got from it too. The framework being this flexible should help a DBA fully use the database to his advantage. The project I work on has had to do some non standard things with Rails and it's flexibility has made it much easier. In our view rails and it's default are a starting point providing the basic infrastructure to get the project going, not an end all be all solution. I see the same thing in NoSQL solutions, they try to give the developers and DBA as much flexibility as possible. They don't really seem to offer any default. RDBMS is basically the sensible defaults without the flexibility. Maybe the in between can be found.