From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-05-19T23:04:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Berkeley DB or Store equivalent?

Mk 27 wrote:
> I have never used mySQL because perl's Storable or BerkeleyDB modules
> always did me fine for cgi stuff.  I am going to be learning rails, so I
> supposed I will have to learn mySQL anyway, but I was wondering: is it
> exclusively web based, or could I use it to produce database files for
> use in a (non web app) ruby script?

I think you're talking about two independent things.

(1) Data storage for a ruby application. There are a whole bunch of 
options for this, SQL and non-SQL, many of which have already been 
mentioned. Of the non-SQL alternatives, one of the simplest (written in 
Ruby) is Madeleine. One for coolness and speed is CouchDB (you talk to 
it via HTTP).

(2) Rails is a web framework, that is, a toolkit for writing web 
applications. Quite often these have some sort of data store on the 
back, but this is not mandatory.

A default Rails app will be configured to use ActiveRecord to talk to a 
sqlite3 SQL database, but you can point it to a different SQL database, 
or disable ActiveRecord entirely in config/environment.rb:

    config.frameworks -= [:active_record]

and then use whatever non-SQL persistence mechanism you like.

As for whether Rails is "exclusively web based" - no, some of the 
components which comprise Rails are useful by themselves - in particular 
ActiveRecord. So you can write a non-Rails, non-web application which 
still uses ActiveRecord to talk to a SQL database.

There are several other SQL abstraction layers available, but the 
advantage of ActiveRecord is that it *is* a component of Rails, which 
means there are lots of excellent books you can buy to make your 
learning process easier.

Hope this makes sense!
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