As far as DB management, I don't buy the whole Rails kool-aid as far as DB constraints go. I still develop constraints, set up foreign keys, and hack around AR

As far as DB management, I don't buy the whole Rails kool-aid as far as DB constraints go. I still develop constraints, set up foreign keys, and hack around AR when it's expedient to do so. AR is marvelous at solving 90% of the standard boring CRUD without any headache, but it isn't a silver bullet, and you can still shoot yourself in the face performance-wise with it. Don't be afraid to overstep its bounds when necessary, but don't prematurely optimize, either. I've worked in CakePHP since learning Rails, and I have to say that more than anything, it makes me really dislike PHP as a language. The framework is pretty decent, but Ruby is so flexible and malleable that it really makes working in PHP painful.