I worked on a project around 2007 that used Ruby on Rails. That was my first experience with Ruby and my first experience with a real web product. I liked Ruby and Rails, but it was easy to get bitten by some of the abstractions. I remember the site bogged down really bad whenever we searched for a record in a large database table. The problem was that the database was hidden behind ActiveRecord, so it was easy to forget we were using a database at all. Writing a for loop to search for a record that matched some criteria felt natural, because our interface was with objects, not the underlying tables. However, behind the scenes, each iteration was a separate query. The result was thousands and thousands of queries, instead of just a single query with a simple WHERE clause. We were essentially doing in Ruby what we could have done much more efficiently in SQL. Once we realized the problem, we rewrote that kind of code so it used more or less raw SQL. The result was much faster, but we lost the readability of the abstraction. Everyone on the team was new to Ruby and Rails (grad students who shuffled in and out each semester), so it's possible that we were just doing things completely wrong. Still, it feels like it shouldn't have been that easy to shoot ourselves in the foot. Have things improved since then? How do you balance nice abstractions like ActiveRecord with performance? How do you make it clear to novices what's going on internally, so they can avoid the mistakes that we made?
