From: djberg96@... (Daniel Berger)
Date: 2004-03-04T00:34:44+09:00
Subject: Re: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution?

Ruby Baby <ruby@hitmedia.com> wrote in message news:<20040303052244.GA89378@mail.hitmedia.com>...
> I try to avoid questions like "Why doesn't Ruby do what ___ does?"
> 
> But I'm stumped by hashes and asking for help to find a new solution.
> 
> I use MySQL databases a lot.  Let's say I have a query to find the
> top-selling albums in my store:
> 
> SELECT sku, artistname, albumtitle, sold FROM albums
> ORDER BY sold DESC LIMIT 20;
> 
> When I get the hash of results from the database, I'm used to making
> the "sku" the hash key since it's the only unique identifier.
> A perfect hash key.  Used everywhere by my iteration methods.

If you use DBI, it *is* the key.

require "dbi"
dbh = DBI.connect(dsn,user,passwd)
sth = dbh.prepare("select sku, artistname, albumtitle, sold...")
sth.execute

while rec = sth.fetch
   puts "SKU: " + rec["SKU"]
   puts "Artist Name: " + rec["ARTISTNAME"]
   # etc, etc...
end

sth.finish
dbh.disconnect

Regards,

Dan