Database choices?

ruby-talk
1

Hi ..

Part of the project I am embarking upon will require an SQL database.
My personal favourites are Firebird and SQLite, however I am not going
to rule out either MySQL or Postgres. However, given that I am a stored
procedure fan, my focus is on Firebird.

I was wondering if anyone has any comments on the maturity of the ruby
database bindings or any other helpful insights. As some basic
parameters:

Data storage: small-moderate (~100Mb)
Updates: approx 5min intervals
Users: small (10-15 conns)
Interface: web + scripts (pref via stored procs)
Platform: Linux / FreeBSD / Solaris / HTML clients

TIA,

···

--
-mark. (probertm at acm dot org)

2

Mark,

I have been using the FireRuby bindings for Firebird for several months
now, and I've been quite pleased:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/fireruby/

What I like:
- has a richer, more complete API compared to the older Interbase
bindings
- well documented
- actively developed and supported
- published as a gem

Possible gotchas:
- Limited BLOB support (not an issue for me)
- Not very mature, so API may still be in flux

BTW... I recently posted a Rails Firebird adapter that uses the
FireRuby extension:

Cheers,
Ken

3

Postges is great ( Stored Procs in Python/Ruby/Perl/Java? ), but for your
requirements it appears SQLite is worth investigating.

It's not inherently multi-user/network of course, which may be a requirement
for you.

···

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4

I've been using PostgreSQL 8.0, with the postgres-pr pure ruby driver,
on FC3, accessed via Rails/XML-RPC and FastCGI. Seems to be working
pretty well so far, although I'm just in test mode...

Yours,

Tom

···

On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 04:36 +0900, Mark Probert wrote:

Hi ..

Part of the project I am embarking upon will require an SQL database.
My personal favourites are Firebird and SQLite, however I am not going
to rule out either MySQL or Postgres. However, given that I am a stored
procedure fan, my focus is on Firebird.

I was wondering if anyone has any comments on the maturity of the ruby
database bindings or any other helpful insights. As some basic
parameters:

Data storage: small-moderate (~100Mb)
Updates: approx 5min intervals
Users: small (10-15 conns)
Interface: web + scripts (pref via stored procs)
Platform: Linux / FreeBSD / Solaris / HTML clients

5

Mark,

Forgot to mention... FireRuby has been compiled for Linux, but not for
the other platforms you mentioned. Peter Wood (the FireRuby
author/maintainer) helped me get the Linux build working (required a
couple of small changes to extconf.rb). I bet it would be pretty
straightforward to build for FreeBSD & Solaris.

Ken