Rafe, have you looked at Pragmatic’s “Deploying Rails Applications” book (just emerging from beta, I think)? It does a pretty good job of pulling together a lot of deployment & monitoring knowledge that has been too widespread to find easily.

Rails apps are easy to write and maintain, but they can be a big pain when you get them out on the server. It seems like my Rails apps are always gobbling up too much memory, or causing the load average on the server to spike, and so on. And it seems like there’s very little guidance out there for people who want to keep that from happening.

Your point about extensibility is right on. Take shared hosting for example. As I understand it DHH is happy to see someone tackle the problem- but the core group doesn’t see that as an immediate requirement…
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/21-the-deal-with-shared-hosts

Beyond that, there are ActiveRecord adapters for DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle that are maintained as part of the main ActiveRecord source tree, which puts them into the category of officially supported databases that aren’t in every Rails project by default. It seems to me that the line has been drawn so that if you want “enterprise” database support you have to go hunt for it - on the grounds that (a) most Rails applications won’t need this and (b) Rails has its sweet spot somewhat below the application size where those databases are most usually found.

Beyond that, of course, since the ActiveRecord code is open source, various people have extended it with additional database support or additional functionality. The ActiveWarehouse project, for example, adds support for data warehousing across several different databases.

Finally, you might want to take a look at http://db2onrails.com/ .

If nothing else this post clarifies that. Once i get slammed a few times I will correct the body of the post.

perhaps tongue in cheek in the sense of a reductio ad absurdam - but no, i admit to ignorance.

douchebag is an overused term.

One, Rails now targets sqlite by default. (I know your MySQL but was tongue in cheek, but still.)

And two, doesn’t starting a flame war with someone over a post from their blog that’s a couple of years old make Atwood a douchebag as well? That’s sort of like getting insulted at a party and calling the person back a week later with a brilliant riposte that occurs to you in the shower. Timeliness counts.