The Rails team has finally released the Rails 3 beta, after more than a year since the Rails and Merb teams started working on this release. You can read all about it at the official Rails blog, but I figured I’d take the opportunity to share my take on the release.

First of all, you’re probably sick of hearing this, but we’ve done far, far more than we ever expected. A lot of that happened in the last few weeks.

Rumors of the demise of relational database systems are greatly exaggerated. The NoSQL movement is increasingly capturing the mindshare of the developers, all the while the academia have been talking about the move away from "RDBMS as one size fits all" for several years.

I have been contemplating the use of document-stores in my Ruby apps for a few months (you might remember my MongoMapper post from back in June), and I've been following developments in the No-SQL movement.

If your application is filesystem IOPS heavy, filesystem sharding might be the route that you want to look at. Basically you add more hardware disk arrays, and split the reads and writes between them. You need to inject some logic into the save and open functions in your application so that it knows which filesystem each file is to be saved to and opened from.

A few months ago, we announced the creation of a "forum" to discuss the future of Rails and what the community is interested in. Since then, many important suggestions/topics were addressed, many features were completed or started.
My goal in this post is to give you a quick overview on the status of the uservoice forum.