Ruby9i Project Summary | JimCain.US

The Ruby9i Library

Ruby9i is a Ruby library that provides access to Oracle9i using the Oracle Call Interface. There are two APIs: the C extension in ruby9i.so and the DBI::DBD-compatible interface defined in Ruby9i.rb.

A simple query using the ruby9i.so API looks like this:

require 'ruby9i'
db = Ruby9i::Database.new('databasename', 'username', 'password')
db.execute('SELECT city, state FROM friends') do |stmt|
   puts stmt.column_names.join(', ')
   stmt.fetch do |row|
      puts row.join(', ')
   end
end
db.disconnect

I'm sure you can come up with some DBI examples on your own.

Background

After being laid off in June 2003, I took a look at Ruby for the first time. My first impression was, "Wow! This is the language I would've written." I wanted to learn more about it, and since I had a lot of time on my hands, I decided to write a Ruby interface to Oracle9i. I had already done something similar for C++ a few years back, and it was a great learning experience. So, the day after reading Ruby's documentation for the first time, I dove right in.

Now in January 2004, I am newly employed as an Oracle9i DBA, and I have been wanting to use Ruby for some automation and scripting tasks—perfect motivation to return to the Ruby9i project. Besides, I'd like Ruby9i to be stable and complete just in time to be enhanced for 10g.

Design Goals

• The three TIMESTAMP types
  
• The two INTERVAL types
• LOBs
• Date functions and date/time arithmetic

Future Directions

• User-defined types (named types)
  
• Collections (VARRAYs and nested tables), including multi-level collections
• Object REFs, object navigation and complex object retrieval
  

Features

• The DATE, TIMESTAMP and INTERVAL types and arithmetic are fully supported.
• Statement#fetch returns Ruby9i-specific types so that Oracle features may be accessed through them. The #to_builtin method is supported by all Ruby9i types so that native Ruby types may be easily retrieved. (Note that data loss will occur in cases where Ruby's precision does not match Oracle's.)

Limitations

• No LOB support yet
  
• There is only one error class (Ruby9i::Error), so the complete DBI error hierarchy is not yet supported.

Known Bugs

Requirements

• An Oracle9i client library is required.
  
• There are numerous uses of C99 syntax, so a modern C compiler is required. I used gcc 3.3.2 on Fedora Linux (core 1). I've had problems building with gcc 2.96, even when using the -std=c99 option, and I have yet to resolve them.
  

User Guide

A user guide is available. It was developed in XML using the DocBook DTD and XSL stylesheet, and I added some minor things to customize the appearance for Ruby. This customization is not yet complete, however. It's still missing support for things like blocks. Even so, you're welcome to download a tarball of the complete documentation set, including the XML and XSL, or just the HTML.

Mailing List

License

The Ruby9i Library is licensed under the Artistic License.

Download

I would appreciate any feedback you might have, especially since this is my first attempt at Ruby.

Last modified January 26, 2004. Send comments to ruby9i@jimcain.us.