From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2008-04-17T01:40:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Is there a One True Postgres interface? Is Ruby-postgresmaintained?

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Christopher Dicely wrote:

| While this may be true in some general sense, I don't think its really
all that
| relevant here. PostgreSQL's protocol is documented and supported over
| TCP/IP, and Ruby certainly has TCP/IP support, so there is no reason you
| couldn't write a pure Ruby PostgreSQL driver.

Specifically speaking, it is not.

|>  Long story short: It's not impossible to define a standard API for Ruby,
|>  but somebody has to do it yet (don't look at me, C makes me scream).
|
| Ruby has a fairly standard DB API: Ruby-DBI. And there's no reason you
| need to use C to write Ruby-DBI database drivers.

Ruby::DBI used to use native adapter gems (at least for MySQL) and
SQLite3, providing a rather thin wrapper around the functions provided
by these native gems.

"The Ruby DBI module includes the code that implements the general DBI
layer, as well as a set of DBD-level drivers. Many of these drivers
require that you have additional software installed. For example, the
database driver for MySQL is written in Ruby and provides a binding to
the Ruby MySQL module, which itself is written in C and provides a
binding to the MySQL C client API. This means that if you want to write
DBI scripts to access MySQL databases, you'll need to have both the Ruby
MySQL module and the C API installed."

~From http://www.kitebird.com/articles/ruby-dbi.html#TOC_2 which is still
referenced by Ruby::DBI.

Also, last time I checked, Ruby-DBI wasn't part of the Ruby STDLIB, but
is a third party tool, which doesn't make it Ruby's API, but a Ruby API
to databases.

Of course, ORMs solve different problems than the Ruby::DBI attempts to
solve.

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan

You want to live forever?  Don't die.
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