MySQL/Ruby on Windows

Question

I am trying to use Rails 2.3.2 with MySQL 5.0 on Windows XP with no luck.
I have installed MySQL and am able to run it, add tables etc.
In ruby, the require 'mysql' statement passes but onde it reached the first action then I get

> C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:7:in `define_all_hashes_method!': Mysql not loaded (RuntimeError)
        from C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:71:in `mysql_connection'
        from C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:223:in `send'
        from C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:223:in `new_connection'
        from C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:245:in `checkout_new_connection'
        from C:/Development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:188:in `checkout'

Any idea to what I am doing wrong?

require 'rubygems'
require 'activerecord'
require 'mysql'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
    :adapter => "mysql",
    :host => "127.0.0.1",
    :database => "ruby"
)


class Student < ActiveRecord::Base
end
Student.find(:all)

Answer 1

Don't you get any other errors, like missing dll files, etc.? Usually with database connectors you have to add the appripriate dll files (like mysql.dll) to the PATH (or in rubys "bin" directory), so ruby can find them.

Answer 2

If you're not deploying to Windows, and your development data is reasonable (<10k rows/table) I'd switch to SQLite. It's sufficiently generic that you should be able to painlessly deploy on MySQL. SQLite installation on Windows is pretty easy - you just have to use an older version of the gem as the newest is broken.

Postgres is another story. I wouldn't use it if SQLite will work. It does case-sensitive searches by default when using LIKE, unlike SQLite or MySQL. If you do use it, check your plugins for LIKE queries.