DB2 support for Ruby/Rails turns 2.0

By Antonio Cangiano. Filed under DB2, Ruby on Rails

The API development team just released a major version of the ibm_db gem. Detailed installation instructions are available on RubyForge (PDF). Among several improvements, there are three particularly newsworthy features:

Support for Ruby 1.9;
Support for mingw32, used by the latest version of the Ruby installer for Windows;;
Performance and security enhancements through “automatic” parameterized queries.

As we approach the release of Rails 3, supporting Ruby 1.9 is becoming more of a necessity. Likewise, the so called “One-Click installer” on Windows has been replaced by a current project that uses mingw32, which offers a much needed performance boost on Windows. Having a mingw32 compatible gem is starting to become a requirement for many of our Windows users.

Finally, DB2 is now the only database that supports prepared statements in ActiveRecord (without changing any of the application’s code). This has important performance benefits, as I explained in my article Improve the security and performance of DB2 Ruby on Rails applications using parameterized queries, which was published today by developerWorks.

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