Is there a tutorial for RoR using legacy DB's

Ruby
1

Hi,

I need to setup a website reporting tool. I thought I try RoR
(therefore I’m
a newbie). But I need to access a legacy database and tables. All the
tutorials I have seen deal with “green” setups. Of course my situation
does
not match the green setup. The table names don’t have ‘s’ on the end.
The
primary keys mostly have pkid as the field name but often are not
numbers
(varchar’s).

So I was wondering if anybody had a URL or what ever to help me get this
running…? (using RoR).

John

2

On 8/18/06, johnf [email protected] wrote:

I need to setup a website reporting tool. I thought I try RoR (therefore I’m
a newbie). But I need to access a legacy database and tables. All the
tutorials I have seen deal with “green” setups. Of course my situation does
not match the green setup. The table names don’t have ‘s’ on the end. The
primary keys mostly have pkid as the field name but often are not numbers
(varchar’s).

So I was wondering if anybody had a URL or what ever to help me get this
running…? (using RoR).

You’ll probably get better answers at
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails than here.

-austin

3

So I was wondering if anybody had a URL or what ever to help me get this
running…? (using RoR).

You’ll probably get better answers at…

He’s right about that being the right place to ask but the short
simplistic answer is that integrating rails with legacy databases is a
pain in the butt because Rails’ ease of use comes from a huge number
of assumptions and conventions that legacy databases rarely adhere to.
It also doesn’t support things like composite keys and other fun and
common db goodness that legacy databasese frequently leverage.

See Dave T.'s RailsConf keynote for more issues with enterprise /
legacy integration.

-kate