Comments on: On Rails and DB2

By: links for 2008-03-02 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog

links for 2008-03-02 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:23:17 +0000

[…] On Rails and DB2 When analyzed under a proverbial microscope, one sees that Rails didn’t actually invent anything new. Neither the MVC paradigm nor the Active record pattern were especially innovative (tags: rubyonrails) […]

By: Lester

Lester — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:52:14 +0000

I have been coding with rails and to date I have not had much problems with it. It helps i think to have some background on basecamp.

By: Nuno Job

Nuno Job — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:38:11 +0000

I made a similar article today 😛 I even quoted the DB2 extended project.

By the way that discussion brings nothing to the site or the articles. Lame is coming here to read the article and get all this garbage. So if I was António I would have censored all of your comments – for the sake of the non troll users that read this blog.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:07:28 +0000

Robert, I first provided an answer to Tim (it was a quick one) and approved his comment. I was then writing a much more articulate reply to yours. When I saw that you were accusing me of censoring you, something that I don’t do unless comments are inappropriate (e.g. vulgar or spammy), I published your comment right away and proceeded with writing a different kind of response afterwards (which is published above). Those who follow this blog know that negative comments are always published and replied to.

By: Robert Hulme

Robert Hulme — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 08:51:15 +0000

I said you were lame because you approved Tim’s comment (which was made 3 hours afterwards) but not mine. Then I pointed out on a site you can’t censor (Reddit) that you were using comment moderation to hide comments that disagreed with you, and lo and behold my comment appeared.

By: Dan Kubb

Dan Kubb — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:13:36 +0000

Antonio, you may want to take a look at DataMapper (http://datamapper.org) if you’re interested in helping out with a Ruby ORM. In many ways its similar to ActiveRecord, but I believe it has a better overall design. Right now a few people on the core team is working on DataObjects (DO), which are basically Ruby/C drivers to the underlying database engine. Currently MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite are supported, and I would bet they would gladly welcome a DB2 driver. Once DO is completed, DM should be the fastest Ruby ORM available.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:52:46 +0000

Robert, calling me names on Reddit is not very nice or mature, is it? Even though your comment comes across as a trolling attempt (in all fairness), it wasn’t published right away only because all comments in this blog are moderated.

I think you misunderstood my article. I am arguing the same things that you do in regards to Open Source contributions.

Also, DB2 support for Rails is very good, and there is no reason to believe it’s behind Oracle at all. What I’m talking about here is my attempt, through a plugin, to make the user experience even better/easier/comfier and closer to that experience by people who pick MySQL as their backend. A plugin that will also implement support for DB2 specific features, and that I will develop in my spare time, with the optional help of the DB2 on Rails community.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:33:54 +0000

Hi Tim,

you’re absolutely right about the fact that MySQL is still the path of least resistance. I’ve removed my remark about SQLite from the article. 🙂

By: tim

tim — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:18:46 +0000

SQLite may be the new default, but I disagree that it’s the “path of least resistance”. MySQL is still the best-supported RDBMS by ActiveRecord by a mile, and not actually that hard to set up (even though I hate it as an RDBMS).

For fun, try creating a table with :id=>false (and your own id column) in SQLite, and then watch AR break left-and-right.

And yeah, I’d file bugs about all of these, except most of the things I’ve run into already have 3-year-old bugs in the Rails trac.

You’re right in that they really only care about the “subset of features which are common to all databases”, but unfortunately this feature set is both undocumented, and much smaller than one might expect.

(Disclaimer: I’m just bitter because I tried to get a production Rails app, running on MySQL, to run its tests in SQLite. After monkeypatching a dozen SQLite bugs — most straight from unapplied patches in Rails’ trac — and no end in sight, I gave up.)

By: Robert Hulme

Robert Hulme — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:00:48 +0000

I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood how Free Open Source Software development works. The drive behind the development of any code is either that someone is being paid to write it because a company wants it, or more often because the developer themself wants the new feature.

If DB2 support isn’t very good in Rails and you want it to be better it is up to you to change it. The rest of the Rails community is under no requirement to produce software that supports your requirements, that’s up to you.

As it happen I’d like to chip in and say that I am using Rails on a project with my employer where I have to deal with a complex schema with billions of rows and composite keys, and it’s a veritable cakewalk to do that with ActiveRecord. If DB2 support falls far behind Oracle support that may indicate something about DB2 and / or the number of DB2 users / developers who have an interest in Rails.