Ruby scripting on Windows

Question

I'm making a simple script using ruby on a Windows 2003 Server. My questions are:

• How can I connect to a database through ODBC? I will be connecting to both Sybase on Solaris and MSSQL Server.
• How can I send emails through an Exchange Server 2003?

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Update

• What's the best simple IDE for Ruby scripting? I currently use SciTE (which comes with Ruby)

Answer 1

There is an ODBC package for the Ruby DBI module available, or you can try to use the ODBC binding for Ruby, which also includes a Win32 binary.

Here an example that uses RDI (stolen from here):

require 'DBI'

# make an ODBC connection
conn = DBI.connect('DBI:ODBC:datasource','your_username','your_password')

# returns a list of the table names from your database
conn.tables

# returns an array with the resultset from your query
rs = conn.select_all('SELECT * FROM TheTable')

(ODBC datasources can be defined using the ODBC Administrator available via Control Panel/Administrative Tools.)

For e-mailing I would suggest you simply use the standard mailing capabilities of Ruby and connect to your Exchange Server through SMTP.

I cannot recommend you a Ruby IDE, though, as I do my text-editing with VIM. :-) Other people might be able to give you a hint on that.

Answer 2

For a Ruby IDE, try NetBeans.

Answer 3

For simple but powerful use ado and ruby on windows.This is a really good example.

Answer 4

Be warned that the ODBC drivers included with the One-Click Installer for Ruby don't seem to be Unicode aware. (Accessing a SQL Server database from Unix, I used FreeTDS to convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 prior to getting it from UnixODBC.) I haven't been able to make a similar conversion in Windows.