I've used Gemstone/S with Smalltalk in a production environment and loved what it did for us in terms of productivity. Not having to worry about persistence is

I've used Gemstone/S with Smalltalk in a production environment and loved what it did for us in terms of productivity. Not having to worry about persistence is awesome. All you have to worry about is getting your data out into other formats if you need to. That for me is a much easier problem to solve than mapping OO concepts to a Relational persistence model. The GLASS environment we were using is close Maglev. Its just swapping Smalltalk for Ruby. For the vast majority of sites that would consider using Maglev, scaling shouldn't be an issue and the Gemstone OODB at that level is very easy to administer and maintain once you learn a few basic concepts. If you want to get a strong understanding of how the OODB works, I strongly suggest you check out James Foster's lengthy 2 part presentation from Smalltalks 2009. http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/james-fosters-introduction-to-gemstone-videos/ http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/james-fosters-i... If anyone has any questions about working with the Gemstone OODB, I'd be happy to have a conversation with you, my email address is in the contact info for my account.