Ruby on Rails adapter/driver (Alpha version) Available
Ruby on Rails (aka “Rails) is one of the hot, new development environments for Web-based, database-driven applications. And now Ingres has a driver available for that environment to give you the access you need to Ingres databases, as well as databases served up by Ingres Corporation products Enterprise Access (EA) and EDBC.
This new driver was a contribution from our Ingres community, and is a great example of how open source can bring new features to a product more quickly. Ingres Corporation has and will continue to enhance the driver. It is currently an Alpha version; that is, not generally available (GA) and hence not supported yet by Ingres Support. However, questions and problems can, for now, be reported on the Ingres forum http://community.ingres.com/forums/index.php?c=3 in the Database Driver and APIs forum and someone from Ingres development will respond.
There are actually two components to the Ingres support for Ruby:
- Ingres Active Record adapter
- Ingres Ruby driver
Both components are required for Rails applications using Active Record (AR), which is the standard Rails Object-to-Relations Mapping (ORM) interface. The adapter implements the AR classes for Ingres; internally, it invokes the classes and methods in the driver to actually communicate with Ingres. The driver, while primarily intended to service the adapter, can also be invoked directly from any Ruby program to communicate with Ingres. To summarize, the AR interface provides an object interface while the driver interface is a more direct SQL-level interface.
The new adapter/driver can be downloaded from the Ingres Connectivity Tools & Drivers web page at http://www.ingres.com/downloads/prod-download-drivers.php. Take it for a ride!