I think the point is, Active Record (like any orm) is a leaky abstraction that covers a small, but common percentage of what you can do with SQL. Any time I've run into problems fighting the "magic" of Active Record, my time was almost always better spent just taking back to hand written SQL (which isn't terrifically difficult with Rails).

Rails absolutely is a framework where you need to abandon some control and trust the framework though. If you need to know exactly how your abstractions work under the hood, it's a poor choice IMO. I doubt there a single person who has comprehensive knowledge of how every single part of Rails works.

Couldn't agree more. Invest a bit of your time gradually learning more SQL and your life will be easier no matter the backend / ORM.

SQL is really not going away anytime soon (it's demise has been falsely predicted many many times). It even fits the current language hype in that it's functional!

You nailed it :)

I love AR, but there are use cases where you just need to create or optimize your queries manually.

> I'm a bit of a control freak, so this lack of insight into the innards makes me (quite possibly unreasonable) uncomfortable

Ok, that could be the reason why you don't like Rails :)

Regarding postgres, its innards become relevant when you have partitioned tables with billions of rows and need to run queries on them for analytics purposes. In these cases you often need to manually create some complex queries from scratch; other times, you can use ActiveRecord "magic" up to a point, but then you either need to add special indexes (eg partial indexes, that saved my ass many times), or you need to replace the automatically-generated queries that ActiveRecord uses and which are good for small numbers, but become a bottleneck when scaling.