New Release of the Ruby Driver and Rails Adapter for DB2

The API team at IBM recently released a new update for the ibm_db gem, which includes both the Ruby driver and the Rails adapter for DB2 (and Informix). This coincides with the release of the latest major upgrade to DB2 LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows), which is now up to version 10.1.

ibm_db 2.5.10 adds support for Rails 3.2 and fixes a few minor bugs that have been reported by the community. New features such as Time Travel Queries are supported seamlessly.

The biggest news is the simplified installation process. You now only need to set the DB2’s instance user home, and the gem installation process will take care of determining both which architecture (e.g., 32 vs 64 bit) and libraries to use.

All it really takes now to install ibm_db on a Linux/Unix/Mac box is something along the lines of:

$ sudo -s
$ export IBM_DB_HOME=/home/db2inst1/sqllib
$ gem install ibm_db

Windows users don’t even have to worry about setting up the home directory. It will work both on Windows 32 and 64 bit systems, but unlike with *nix systems, Ruby and ibm_db will run in 32 bit mode only.

To try out DB2 with Ruby/Rails, I recommend you download and install DB2 Express-C for free.

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2 Comments

  1. brad May 9, 2012
  2. Praveen May 10, 2012

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