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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

The DB setup in Drupal is very join heavy - on the new site many things that are joins in Drupal will be single table - many things drupal offers one-to-many on we only need one-to-one, so can avoid the join.

Plus, with the modules we're using we're more or less forced to use MySQL.

Rails site will be using Postgres.

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So basically, because default Drupal's database schema is too normalized and generic you experience problems.

As for Postgresql - you are going to write new code anyway - either in Rails or patch Drupal modules to work correctly with Postgresql. So this one is definitely not a deal breaker.

I would advise also to look into option of upgrading to Drupal 7 and using its DB stuff. While it is still join-heavy by default, you have more power to manipulate schema and for example to have flat tables for your content types or store some stuff in MongoDB. And all of it with still Drupal's flexibility and mostly configuring stuff instead of writing it.

We've made the corporate decision - after many bad experiences - to purge PHP from production, for the sake of our sanity.

We are not doing this lightly. The current codebase has ~2.5 man years invested in it.

I strongly endorse this idea. The faster and more completely the development community moves away from using PHP in production, the better. I've started telling people not that PHP is bad, but that PHP is the avatar of technical debt. No matter what you personally do with PHP, the creators of the language and the other participants in the PHP ecosystem make it impossible to create a significant project in PHP without taking on ruinous amounts of technical debt - some of which takes the form of critical security problems! Python and Ruby, despite their faults, are more secure by default and have better security teams.

So in summary, I bet that purging PHP was tough, and I think you made the right choice.

From my experience technology is a big factor, but not ultimate. Ultimate factor is community around particular project. I truly believe Drupal community at this point is just right mix of following standrds and being focused on innovating in the same time. Whenever you custom code - you loose this huge leverage otherwise you could have by re-using existing UI/code/architecture (where architecture might be first and most important in the list.)

Anyway, I truly wish you luck with you project, but I would advise not to drop any particular technology just for sake of dropping it.

(I am not PHP fan, I am Drupal and Drupal community fan)

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