Rails vs MS SQL Server

So, I am finishing off a couple of Ruby on Rails apps that fell to me (from where I had just a supporting role) to finish and deploy. Several bugs that appeared in the production app where it had worked fine in development gave me fits.

Most had to do with the way that the development SQlite seemed to be more permissive than the production's MS SQL Server. Sometimes, updating rails to 3.2.x would fix it. But that would also introduce new problems.

The worst was when I finally got my bug list squashed only to have new bug for settled issues appear. Suddenly my .empty? statements stopped working. So I switched to .blank? on advice from Ruby Quicktips. I suppose I need to do some deeper reading on the language rather than just Googling when I need a function. Part of the trouble is that I will have to pay attention to Ruby versions and what might or might not work with a database.

I think it is also time to stop doing tutorials and actually write an app up from scratch.