I am investigating ways to connect my Ruby (non-Rails) application on
Windows
to either MSSQL, MySql or Oracle databases. ODBC seems to be a common
way
for accessing them, so I wonder how to best access ODBC from Ruby.

Searching on the Web, I found solutions using DBI, or the ODBC Library
at http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/. Now I wonder:

- Are there other alternative ODBC interfaces?
- Are some of them available as gem? Which ones?
- Are there interfaces written in "plain ruby", so that the application
might also run under JRuby? (Of course I can use JDBC on JRuby as an
alternative - I'm here more interested in Ruby vs. JRuby compatibility).

Any suggestions?

Ronald

- Why not try out a few of the different ODBC options and evaluate
them? And, preferably, post here or put up an article somewhere with
your findings, for the benefit of others ? including me :-) I'd
appreciate that as I intend to do some work with Ruby/DBI/ODBC. If you
don't I'll probably do it myself after a while.

- To use the same code in both Ruby and JRuby, if there are no pure-
Ruby libraries, you could consider writing a thin wrapper of your own
with alternative underlying Ruby/DBI and JRuby/JDBC implementations. I
know this would mean writing more code but it might not be all that
much, and you'd then have that code to use in other projects as well.
The ODBC/DBI/JDBC interfaces/API are all roughly similar, so you might
not have too much work to do, plus you could always bypass your own
wrapper and call through directly to whichever underlying interface
you're really using in a particular app, for any special cases that
your wrapper can't handle.

Just my 2c ...