From: Jim Clark <diegoslice@...>
Date: 2007-10-26T02:24:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Making ODBC connections without explicitly coding a password

Anne Burgess wrote:
> We're developing Ruby programs which read and write from/to DB2 tables
> on a mainframe.  We're the first people in the company to use Ruby so
> are rather feeling our way.  So far we've been using our own IDs and
> passwords, explicitly coded, to make ODBC connections to access
> development tables, but I've learnt that due to our security rules I
> won't be allowed to know the password for the ID which will access live
> tables.  Can anyone please suggest a way round explicitly coding the
> password?  Thank you.
>   
If you are on Windows, you can set up a system DSN with the username and 
password encoded there. Using DBI, you can then just reference the DSN 
to access the database such as:

dbh = DBI.connect("DBD:ODBC:myDSN")

HTH,
Jim