Hello! I’m new to Ruby and Rails, but have been reading along here, and
searched the archives and didn’t see anything addressing some concerns I
have with using Rails and Firebird.
I prefer Firebird when it is available, and I’m very pleased to see that
others have gotten it working with Ruby. I have been trying to use it
with Rails, with mixed success.
I’ve been looking at the books, mailing list archives, and sources, and
haven’t seen an answer to these issues. Pointers to where I should have
looked or discussion of the problem would be great! If there are things
that need fixing, I’m happy to try and help.
I thought I’d ask here and see if there was any information about the
problems I’ve been having before I e-mailed the authors of the Firebird
adapter and FireRuby to see if there is anything I’m missing or can help
with.
Any discussion would be welcome.
First problem: [bug] Segmentation fault.
One of my machines segfaults every time a Firebird query of any
complexity
is issued. The other machine I’m working on handle fairly complicated
things easily.
In trying to isolate differences, I noticed that one machine is running
Firebird 1.5.0, and the other is running Firebird 1.5.2. Usually the
newer one works better, but not in this case. I’ll be trying to upgrade
them both to 1.5.3 to see if that changes anything. Ruby and Rails are
the same on both machines.
Has anyone else noticed problems with Firebird 1.5.2, or seen anything
like this?
Second problem: Fixtures don’t seem to allow quoting of column names.
I’ve got a table that uses acts_as_list. It sounds like just the ticket
for this data, and I’d love to let the framework do this piece of busy
work for me.
Firebird uses position as a keyword (as well as at least one other thing
Rails uses, ‘type’) and you have to know how to make it work. In the
table
definition, they must be quoted, and all caps, “POSITION”. Easy enough
once you know to do it, and it’s documented.
The code in ActiveRecord even seems to be right, and refers to this
column. The queries work as expected. Yay!
The code that loads the fixtures does not, however, seem to use those
same
rules to manipulate the tables, and does not get the capitalization and
quoting right for the database. I did try to put quotes in the fixture,
and a couple of other things, which did not work.
This means I can’t use any test cases on a table with a position column.
Has anyone got a fix or work-around for this? I looked briefly for the
code to load the fixtures, but did not find it. Can someone give me a
quick heads up on where that lives so I can look and see if it needs
updating to get this right?
Will this be affecting any other databases? Doesn’t Oracle use
‘position’
and ‘type’ as well?
Third problem: Migrations don’t work.
The documentation notes that migrations won’t work with Firebird. They
look like very useful things, and I’d like to be able to use them. Has
anyone looked at what this would take to fix? What’s missing? How can
I
help?
Fourth problem: rake tests doesn’t work.
The documentation does not mention this, but the Firebird adapter
apparently does not implement the “tables” functionality, so “rake
tests”
does not work. Bummer. I suspect that if migrations were fixed, this
would work, too.
Again, has anyone heard anything about this?
I’d love to hear back from anyone successfully using Firebird with
Rails!
–
Louis Erickson - [email protected] - Lou's Home Page!
Labor, n.:
One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
– Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”
