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Rails != ActiveRecord

This isn't rocket science. You start your project rails new foo. You include gem 'rails' in your Gemfile. You're a rails application. How you architect for growth is beside the point.

Maybe it can be defined as the core-front-end is using ActiveRecord (or a NoSQL equivalent) to do most of the DB interaction and the Rails controller and routing mechanisms?

By that standard, Twitter wouldn't count (and it isn't on this list), just as Twitter shouldn't be on a Top 10 Drupal sites list since only the dev docs are in Drupal.

@Scribd we built https://github.com/kovyrin/db-charmer to manage multiple model connections to separate servers/databases.

gem 'rails'