DB2 on Rails

DB2 Express-C 9.7.1 is out

2009-12-03T18:58:29Z

As I briefly mentioned on my personal blog, DB2 Express-C 9.7.1 is finally out and includes a long list of enhancements. I recommend that fellow DB2 on Rails developers, download and install it on their system.

You can grab it directly from here:

New version of the DB2 Ruby on Rails support is out

2009-07-31T00:34:44Z

Our development team just released version 1.1.1 of the IBM_DB gem which provides support for using Ruby on Rails with DB2 and IDS. The new gem provides support for Activerecord 2.3.3 and a fix for a defect that will let us implement support for a popular Ruby on Rails application. Antonio Cangiano will no doubt blog about this as soon as he is done (any day now).

JRuby team leaves SUN/Oracle and goes to Engine Yard

2009-07-28T22:07:56Z

Oracle’s acquisition of SUN seems to be unraveling in a number of areas. Citing lack of certainty (guess it means “uncertainty”) the JRuby team decided to leave SUN/Oracle and join Engine Yard. As Antonio Cangiano pointed in his blog, JRuby is indeed critical to the adoption of Ruby on Rails in the enterprise. Given Engine Yard’s commitment to Ruby on Rails this is a great move for the Ruby community. We wish JRuby and Engine Yard teams the best.

DB2onRails.com will be cheering for you!

Support for Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails 2.3 is here

2009-03-26T16:10:14Z

The IBM API team just released a juicy update of the ibm_db gem. Version 1.0.5 packs support for ActiveRecord 2.3.2, which is included in the latest, recently released version of Rails, as well as being compatible with Ruby 1.9.1 (you can read this post of mine to learn why this is important). To be more exact, this release enables the driver to work as a ASCII driver when using Ruby 1.9.1, with Unicode support to follow in upcoming releases.

1.0.5 also includes support for the SQLRowcount feature and fixes three bugs: one related to setting the schema on z\OS, another about LOB handling, and finally an edge case about nested queries that were truncated.

To install or update this gem on Windows, simply run:

gem install ibm_db

On Linux, run the following:

sudo -s
export IBM_DB_INCLUDE=/home/db2inst1/
sqllib/include
export IBM_DB_LIB=/home/db2inst1/sqllib/lib
gem install ibm_db

IBM_DB 1.0.2 released

2009-03-13T14:41:01Z

A few days ago the IBM API team released an update for the Ruby driver and Rails adapter for IBM databases. This specific release of the IBM_DB gem (1.0.2) fixes a couple of LOB related bugs that were recently found, and adds support for the timeout parameter for ActiveRecord. In practice this means that you’ll now be able to specify a timeout value within your config/database.yml file, which expresses the amount of time in ~~milliseconds~~ seconds before an attempt to establish a connection with DB2 timeouts.

For example, the development section of said configuration file may look like this:


development:
 adapter: ibm_db
 username: db2inst1
 password: secret
 database: db_name
 schema: myapp
 timeout: 5

In this case, the timeout for each connection was 5 seconds.

We hope you’ll find this release useful. Give it a try, and please report any issues, however unlikely they may be, in the RubyForge forum.

DB2 on the new Rails Wiki

2009-02-12T05:18:24Z

The Rails team launched a new wiki, as the previous one had become way too messy. You can read about the reasons behind this choice in the official blog announcement. There wasn’t a DB2 page among the supported databases pages so I created one here. It covers the installation of the ibm_db gem, how to create a Rails app with a config/database.yml file prepopulated for DB2, and also provides a few helpful pointers. If you find any issues with it, please let us know or feel free to modify it yourself.

Using DB2 and Rails on Mac OS X

2008-12-23T23:38:44Z

It was pre-announced over the weekend and has now been officially announced: DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X is finally available for download. To help get you started from the Rails side of things, this announcement also contains a few hints regarding how to set up your ibm_db stack and how to use it on our newest platform. Enjoy!

Common pitfalls when installing the ibm_db gem

2008-11-11T21:13:02Z

Installing the ibm_db gem on Windows is as easy as running gem install ibm_db. Next to no problems have been reported, as the the installation is as smooth as it gets. On Linux things can get a bit trickier though. Having helped dozens of people resolve installation problems, I’ve gathered some insight into what the common pitfalls are when installing the ibm_db gem on *nix systems. Here I’ve put together a checklist, in case you’re experiencing issues with your own install.

First and foremost, the most common error message is a variant of the following:


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

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install ibm_db
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.

Provided configuration options:
	--with-opt-dir
	--without-opt-dir
	--with-opt-include
	--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
	--with-opt-lib
	--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
  ...
  ...

The gem fails to install because the SQLConnect() function provided by DB2’s development headers (which are required to build the gem) cannot be found/loaded.

This brings us to our quick checklist:

1. Have you sourced the profile? This is done by running:

. /home/db2inst1/sqllib/db2profile

You may need to replace the dot, with source depending on your shell.

2. Have you specified where DB2’s directory and library are to be found? You can do so by running:


export IBM_DB_DIR=/home/db2inst1/sqllib
export IBM_DB_LIB=/home/db2inst1/sqllib/lib32

3. Did you install the required development headers during the installation? These are available by selecting “Base application development tools” under the section “Application Development Tools” in the DB2 Setup Wizard (having selected a “custom” installation beforehand).

You can double check this by running:

ls /home/db2inst1/sqllib/include

This should show you a series of .h files, including sqlcli1.h. If you don’t see them, then you need to repeat the setup procedure so as to add the development tools. Likewise, you should also see a series of .so files, including
libdb2.so when you run: ls /home/db2inst1/sqllib/lib32.

4. Are you trying to perform the installation when logged in as the db2inst1 user? If you’re doing this, it’s best not to. It doesn’t matter if db2inst1 is a suoder or not. Don’t run sudo gem install ibm_db as the instance user.

5. If nothing else works, try to install as the root user (on certain systems sudo won’t cut it). The following complete procedure works in 99% of cases:


sudo -s
. /home/db2inst1/sqllib/db2profile
export IBM_DB_DIR=/home/db2inst1/sqllib
export IBM_DB_LIB=/home/db2inst1/sqllib/lib32
gem install ibm_db

If this checklist doesn’t help you, then you can reach for the RubyForge forum, where the DB2 on Rails community and the IBM team will be happy to help you.

A major milestone for DB2 on Rails

2008-11-09T21:44:11Z

The IBM API development team has released version 1.0 of the ibm_db gem, which includes both the Ruby driver, and the Rails adapter, for IBM’s databases. This is a very important milestone for the DB2 on Rails community, and it ships with quite a few goodies.

Besides a few bug fixes, this version adds support for DB2’s secure connections via SSL, short-hands to use char, double and xml when using both create_table and change_table in Rails’ new “sexy migrations”, and enables change_column_null to work with DB2.

Even more importantly, it adds support for Transactional Migrations in Rails 2.2. What this means to you is that any DDL changes performed by a migration file before an exception has been raised, will be rolled back by DB2. This is a handy new feature in Rails 2.2, and our gem backed support for it, even before this version of Rails was shipped.

Speaking of Rails 2.2, which is about to be released, you’ll finally be able to run rails my_app -d ibm_db. This will generate a DB2-specific config/database.yml file. This move is possible thanks to a patch that was submitted by IBM to the Rails team. As handy as it is, the great news is not so much in this new feature, but rather in the fact that the Rails team has shown that they’re open to accepting patches that extend features to commercial databases as well, and not only the three open source ones they support. This can open up a world of possibilities for the future of DB2 on Rails, and it will mean less reliance on external plugins.

As usual, install as follows (on *nix systems):


$ . /home/db2inst1/sqllib/db2profile
$ export IBM_DB_DIR=/home/db2inst1/sqllib
$ export IBM_DB_LIB=/home/db2inst1/sqllib/lib
$ sudo gem update
$ sudo gem install ibm_db

On Windows, simply run:


gem install ibm_db

7 ways to contribute to the DB2 and Informix communities

2008-10-02T04:12:41Z

The community surrounding DB2 is steadily growing, both within IBM and outside. Today is the first Online Community Action Day during which IBM invites IBMers, and information management product users in general, to actively participate more in the community.

Whether you use DB2 with Ruby, Rails or on its own, you too can get involved. And the same goes if you opt for Informix instead. Here are a few suggestions:

Head on over to ChannelDB2 and register;
Sign up for free with the IDUG or IIUG user groups;
Join a Facebook group for DB2 or Informix;
Take a moment to respond to even a single question in the developerWorks forums or on comp.databases.ibm-db2 (or comp.databases.informix
Send an e-mail to a couple of colleagues or friends and pass on links to ChannelDB2, PlanetDB2, Informix Zone, the XML Contest homepage (which went live today), or other community sites;
Find a blog post that you appreciated and take the time to leave a comment saying “thank you”.
If you are feeling ambitious, start your own blog about DB2 or Informix, sharing your experiences with the community.

There you have it. And whatever you decide to do, remember that it greatly benefits our community and can help foster its growth. Thank you.