Connecting to SQL Server with ActiveRecord

Question

Have you ever had to connect to SQL Server with ActiveRecord? Is this possible? Can anyone provide some starting points?

Answer 1

This what I used:

From here: http://github.com/rails-sqlserver/2000-2005-adapter/tree/master

Installation

First, you will need Ruby DBI and Ruby ODBC. To my knowledge the ADO DBD for DBI is no longer supported. The installation below is not a comprehensive walk thru on how to get all the required moving parts like FreeTDS installed and/or configured. It will also assume gem installations of both the dependent libraries and the adapter itself.

It should be noted that this version of the adapter was developed using both the ancient 0.0.23 version of DBI up to the current stable release of 0.4.0. Because later versions of DBI will be changing many things, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you max your install to version 0.4.0 which the examples below show. For the time being we are not supporting DBI versions higher than 0.4.0. The good news is that if you were using a very old DBI with ADO, technically this adapter will still work for you, but be warned your path is getting old and may not be supported for long.

$ gem install dbi --version 0.4.0
$ gem install dbd-odbc --version 0.2.4
$ gem install rails-sqlserver-2000-2005-adapter -s http://gems.github.com

From here: http://lambie.org/2008/02/28/connecting-to-an-mssql-database-from-ruby-on-ubuntu/

Firstly, update your ~/.profile to include the following:

export ODBCINI=/etc/odbc.ini
export ODBCSYSINI=/etc
export FREETDSCONF=/etc/freetds/freetds.conf

Then reload your .profile, by logging out and in again.

Secondly, on Ubuntu 7.10 Server I needed to install some packages.

mlambie@ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude install unixodbc unixodbc-dev freetds-dev sqsh tdsodbc

With FreeTDS installed I could configure it like this:

mlambie@ubuntu:/etc/freetds$ cat freetds.conf
[ACUMENSERVER]
  host = 192.168.0.10
  port = 1433
  tds version = 7.0

The important thing here is ACUMENSERVER, which is the DSN that I’ll use when connecting to the database. The host, and port are self-explanatory, and it’s worth noting that I had to use 7.0 specifically as the tds version.

Testing FreeTDS is not too hard:

mlambie@ubuntu:~$ sqsh -S ACUMENSERVER -U username -P password
sqsh: Symbol `_XmStrings' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
sqsh-2.1 Copyright (C) 1995-2001 Scott C. Gray
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
For more information type '\warranty'
1> use acumen
2> go
1> select top 1 firstname, lastname from tblClients
2> go

[record returned]

(1 row affected)
1> quit

Next up it’s necessary to configure ODBC:

mlambie@ubuntu:/etc$ cat odbcinst.ini
[FreeTDS]
Description     = TDS driver (Sybase/MS SQL)
Driver          = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so
Setup           = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsS.so
CPTimeout       =
CPReuse         =
FileUsage       = 1

mlambie@ubuntu:/etc$ cat odbc.ini
[ACUMENSERVER]
Driver          = FreeTDS
Description     = ODBC connection via FreeTDS
Trace           = No
Servername      = ACUMENSERVER
Database        = ACUMEN

I then tested the connection with isql:

mlambie@ubuntu:~$ isql -v ACUMENSERVER username password
+---------------------------------------+
| Connected!                            |
|                                       |
| sql-statement                         |
| help [tablename]                      |
| quit                                  |
|                                       |
+---------------------------------------+
SQL> use ACUMEN
[][unixODBC][FreeTDS][SQL Server]Changed database context to 'Acumen'.
[ISQL]INFO: SQLExecute returned SQL_SUCCESS_WITH_INFO
SQLRowCount returns -1
SQL> select top 1 firstname from tblClients;

[record returned]

SQLRowCount returns 1
1 rows fetched
SQL> quit

OK, so we’ve got ODBC using FreeTDS to connect to a remote MSSQL server. All that’s left is to add Ruby into the mix.

mlambie@ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude install libdbd-odbc-ruby

The last thing to test is that Ruby can use DBI and ODBC to hit the actual database, and that’s easy to test:

mlambie@ubuntu:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require "dbi" 
=> true
irb(main):002:0> dbh = DBI.connect('dbi:ODBC:ACUMENSERVER', 'username', 'password')
=> #<DBI::DatabaseHandle:0xb7ac57f8 @handle=#<DBI::DBD::ODBC::Database:0xb7ac5744
@handle=#<odbc::database:0xb7ac576c>, @attr={}>, @trace_output=#</odbc::database:0xb7ac576c><io:0xb7cbff54>,
@trace_mode=2>
irb(main):003:0> quit

And a more complete test (only with SQL SELECT, mind you):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'dbi'
db = DBI.connect('dbi:ODBC:ACUMENSERVER', 'username', 'password')
select = db.prepare('SELECT TOP 10 firstname FROM tblClients')
select.execute
while rec = select.fetch do
  puts rec.to_s
end
db.disconnect
</io:0xb7cbff54>

From here (to fix the odbc lib being in the wrong place): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=433435&page=2

libtdsodbc.so
with freeTDS (freetds-dev, tdsodbc), you can either edit the path in the odbcinst.ini file for the [FreeTDS] driver section OR cp the /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so into /usr/lib/libtdsodbc.so.

either way works when accessing mssql from the prompt

isql -v $dsn $user $passwd

i found this to be useful

http://www.unixodbc.org/doc/FreeTDS.html#Configuration

And then in the database.yml file:

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  mode: odbc
  dsn: dsn_name
  username: my_username
  password: my_password

Answer 2

These are the steps i've compiled for Centos 5.3. It took me a lot of trial and error to get this working. It's from a completely clean Centos installation.

Install EPEL:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Install ruby, rubygems, freetds, unixODBC, development tools:

yum install gcc
yum install freetds
yum install ruby-devel
yum install unixODBC-devel
yum install ruby rubygems

Install rails:

gem install rails

Install DB related gems:

gem install dbd-odbc
gem install rails-sqlserver-2000-2005-adapter -s http://gems.github.com

Download, build and install ruby-odbc:

wget http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
tar zxvf ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
cd ruby-odbc-0.9997
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install

Final gem list:

# gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.3.2)
actionpack (2.3.2)
activerecord (2.3.2)
activeresource (2.3.2)
activesupport (2.3.2)
dbd-odbc (0.2.4)
dbi (0.4.1)
deprecated (2.0.1)
rails (2.3.2)
rails-sqlserver-2000-2005-adapter (2.2.17)
rake (0.8.7)

You can use various tools like isql to test your ODBC connection. Brian's post covers this in nice detail so I won't repeat. In rails you need a database.yml that looks something like this:

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  mode: odbc
  dsn: dsnName
  username: username
  password: password