This is an OpenQuestion for me, but perhaps someone else knows...

Rails itself does not require a database. You are free to substitute anything else instead of ActiveRecord for your model class (ActiveRecord _is_ heavily wed to SQL).

*Potential Non-database models*

* CSV
* LDAP (see ActiveLDAP)
* [[Madeleine]]
* plain text files

h2. Examples

Checkout Instiki 0.10.0 from SVN repository at dev.instiki.org and see how Madeleine is used instead of ActiveRecord. Particularly, have a look at "@lib/active_record_stub.rb@":http://dev.instiki.org/file/instiki/trunk/lib/active_record_stub.rb .

h2. Keeping Rails from establishing a DB connection

For Rails 0.12.1, I commented out the following line from @config/environment.rb@:

<pre><code>
# ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
</code></pre>