Hmm; this might make it more attractive to investigate Chorus, the Rails-based analytics application that Pivotal also open-sourced (https://github.com/Chorus/chorus).

It was always awkward to figure out what components you needed to build a development environment for it. It depended on having a virtual machine with a specific version of Greenplum Database running in it, but that version of the database wasn't easy to find. An open source Greenplum Database might make it easier to get started.