From: "Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido" <gerardo.santana@...>
Date: 2008-04-30T01:02:36+09:00
Subject: Re: DBI:ibm_db connection for IBM DB2 database

On 4/28/08, Nicholas Quaine <nquaine2@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Nicholas,

> This is good to know. Although I am still not clear on what the
> difference is between a database adapter for ruby and a database driver
> for ruby.

The "database driver" is a Ruby library that provides an interface for
accessing a database without any other intermediary than the vendor
library and in some cases (like MySQL and PostgreSQL) even without it,
just talking the protocol directly.

The adapter Antonio is talking about is a piece of code written on top
of the "database driver" that provides an interface expected by, in
this case, Ruby on Rails, a web development framework.

Using Informix as an example.

This is the "driver", a Ruby library that uses the C libraries
supplied by IBM. Written in C and Ruby.
http://github.com/santana/ruby-informix/tree/master

This is the adapter for Ruby on Rails, that uses the above driver,
written entirely in Ruby.
http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/adapters/informix/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/informix_adapter.rb


> Further confusion arose in my case because there is a profusion of info
> out there for DB2 connection from Ruby on Rails - which tends to drown
> out the info that is available for just Ruby to DB2 without the Rails -
> in the end you start to wonder whether or not it is possible without
> Rails - but as you have shown me, it is indeed possible.

If you want to access DB2 outside Rails, you want the IBM driver for
Ruby, called ibm_db, that Antonio mentioned above.

-- 
Gerardo Santana