[ryanbrunner]

I definitely agree that when writing Rails at scale, it's extremely important to view ActiveRecord as just another tool in the toolbox, and not always effective for every use case. I've worked in places that had a dogmatic aversion to ever writing raw SQL, and to a one they always suffered for it in performance sensitive code.

At the places who did handle this well, the "high-performance code" that needs to be hand-tuned SQL is usually much smaller than you think (a few queries here and there), and ActiveRecord is still great for your simple queries or for smallish tables.