[wildjim]

Years ago, before ActiveRecord, I started writing my own ORM for Ruby. I got a reasonable way into it, too. I gave it up, because I realised that it was much, much simpler to write many small PL/SQL views and write-triggers and use temporary local objects and/or lazy writes (etc). The DB could do much better query-optimisation this way, for one thing. But anyway, that was a long time ago.

TBH: If you want all your relational logic in your app, NoSQL systems make an awful lot more sense these days -- esp. if you've got a decent API/wrapper-layer that can automatically manage the freshness of locally cached data for you.