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In this presentation, I wish to challenge some orthodoxy within and around Rails. My main concern is that is only one good reason to use MySQL, and that reason should not appeal to most Rails developers. I will be contrasting Rails with PostgreSQL which is the most obvious alternative for this audience. The position that Rails holds as the default open source database is certainly not idiosyncratic to the Rails community. But that position is supported by DHH’s support for MySQL, along with his distaste for stored procedures and the like. My second proposition tonight is that there certainly are valid uses for code in your database, and I hope to end by raising the question of how it affects your code if you decide to make your Rails database smart for general discussion.