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Installing the Ruby driver for DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Antonio Cangiano

Now that Mac OS X 10.6 is out, it’s time to leave the world of 32 bit computing behind. The pre-installed Ruby interpreter will run in 64 bit mode by default, so you may need to pay attention when installing some C-based gems. The ibm_db Ruby gem for DB2 can easily be installed or updated to the latest available version by following these simple steps:

$ sudo -s
$ export IBM_DB_LIB=/Users/<username>/sqllib/lib64
$ export IBM_DB_INCLUDE=/Users/<username>/sqllib/include
$ export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"
$ gem install ibm_db

You can verify that the installation was successful my running the following:

$ irb
>> require 'ibm_db.bundle'
=> true

Please let me know if you encounter any issues, I’d be glad to help you.

Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano is an Engineering Manager and AI Specialist at IBM. He authored Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009) and Technical Blogging (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2012, 2019). He is also the Marketing Lead for Cognitive Class, an educational initiative which he helped grow from zero to over 3 Million students. You can follow him on Twitter.

2 responses to “Installing the Ruby driver for DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard”

  1. Enabling support for DB2 and Python/Django/SQLAlchemy on Mac OS X Snow Leopard | Zen and the Art of Programming

    […] Installing the Ruby driver for DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard […]

  2. Bradley Symons

    Yes, I have a problem, when I am running the gem install I am recieving this error:

    Building native extensions. This could take a while…
    ERROR: Error installing ibm_db:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
    checking for SQLConnect() in -ldb2… no
    checking for SQLConnect() in -ldb2… no
    *** extconf.rb failed ***
    Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
    necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
    details. You may need configuration options.

    Any ideas?

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