After the meeting on Thursday I instantly became enthusiastic about
the Ruby language and the Rails platform again, so thanks for that!

Is anyone familiar with Hypertable (the open source Bigtable clone)?

I always get the impression that rails (well, active record) tries
really really hard to turn a relational database (mysql, sqlite) into
an object oriented one. It tries that so hard that anyone who likes
relational databases starts screaming in agony ("what?! integers as
primary keys?! No real foreign keys?! Don't you care about data
integrity?!").

So why not use a real object oriented database?

I could not find an initiative to make rails use Hypertable, but
perhaps I wasn't looking good enough.

Cheers,

Sjors

[0] http://hypertable.org/