> The other is that you still have to synchronize those migrations with changes to the models of the framework (example: add belongs_to, has_many, etc.) even if

> The other is that you still have to synchronize those migrations with changes to the models of the framework (example: add belongs_to, has_many, etc.) even if ActiveRecord autodiscovers the fields of the tables. Yeah, this is the part that's the problem, not the migrations themselves. Keeping this boilerplate in sync with the db is the bane of my existence in my framework and is a completely unnecessary task. Using the ORM itself is even worse, but I digress. In apps I started from scratch, I dropped all that garbage in favor of repositories that send straight SQL to the db and all these issues dissapeared, including the slow 10x query overhead. > The latter is true even if you write the migrations in Ruby and is true also for any pair of framework / language I know. Maybe it's true for Rails, but there are plenty of frameworks that work fine without ORMs, ActiveRecord, or other such nonsense. To me, such systems are a step back from straight SQL and add unnecessary overhead that only gets in the way and slows down development. Having the SQL in a file and auto-generating functions on top like HugSQL does in Clojure (https://github.com/layerware/hugsql https://github.com/layerware/hugsql) is by far the most optimized system for db access I've seen. Other languages have these types of libraries as well. Another option is query builders. It's simply false that a db access framework needs to be configured with boilerplate based on the db schema. Yes, that's the case for the idiotic ORMs, but certainly not the case for other libraries which are available in pretty much every language.