This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Leon Katsnelson. Original Post: The status of DB2 and Rails 2.x Feed Title: DB2 on Rails Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DB2OnRails Feed Description: Agile development for enterprises large and small Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Leon Katsnelson Latest Posts From DB2 on Rails

I’d like to take a moment to provide a small status update on what’s been going on in the DB2 on Rails world. The Alphaworks starter toolkit hasn’t been update for a long time, so someone may wrongly assume that the project is not maintained, but nothing could be further from the truth. The toolkit will be updated in order to provide a Windows one click install alternative sometime in the near future, but the real action these days has moved to Rubyforge.

The development and improvement of the IBM_DB Ruby driver and ActiveRecord adapter is considered a priority and there is continuos work carried out by the API development team. In fact, another important update for the ibm_db gem was released just yesterday. The gem makes the installation and upgrade process very straightforward on both Windows and Linux. If you’ve already installed a previous version through RubyGems, all you have to do in order to upgrade to the current 0.9.4 version, is run: gem update (with sudo if on Linux/Unix).

The new gem fixes a few bugs and, more interestingly, adds support for XML columns in Rails 2 style migrations. This means that you can define tables that take advantage of pureXML, with the new “sexy migration” syntax. Here is an example:

class CreateCustomers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :customers do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.xml :info

      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :customers
  end
end

Concisely, the main message is: DB2 works with Rails 2, it’s supported by IBM and there are many customers who are successfully using it for their projects.

You may not be able to use minor conveniences (like rake db:create), given that these aren’t implemented for DB2 by the Rails team, but that won’t affect your ability to use DB2 on Rails. That said, on a side note, I started working on a Rails plugin called DB2 Extended in order to simplify the development process for you, and add DB2 specific functionalities to the framework. It’s a personal project, not an IBM one, and it’s still in its infancy, but feel free to take advantage of it and contribute with your own patches.

It’s all about you

The API team efforts would be wasted if they weren’t focused on what really interests you. It is therefore important that you let us know about your experiences with the DB2 on Rails stack, send us your feedback, be it encouragingly kind words or frustrated ones.

If you discover a bug, it’s crucial that you log a ticket on Rubyforge. And if you are unsure about it being an actual bug please don’t be shy, and feel free to start a discussion thread on the fora. We thank you in advance for your partecipation.