Moderator: Clifford Heath, Principal Consultant, Data Constellation

Data Management policies and practices in the enterprise tend to conflict with the agile approach engendered by Rails. What can we improve in Rails ad in our own design practices to better support these environments, to enable us to slide in Rails without encountering the data police?

Composite Keys is a necessary starting point, as is proper stored procedure support, and these things are either not actively supported or still maturing.

Many database design tools and techniques also apply (such as Object Role Modeling, entity relationship diagramming, UML) but don't necessarily create designs that follow the Rails patterns. Should we adapt them, or adapt Rails to them, or both?

And finally, though ActiveRecord is a powerful O/RM solution, it still often happens in such applications that any one controller action must go to the database multiple times to fetch related items of data. What is the best way to improve performance and scalability of our database systems by batching these calls?