Unidata

Rails
1

I have been explaining the benefits of a Rails platform to someone, who
has replied to me with the following:

“On paper this looks okay but practically you will need to connect to a
non-relational database. The database we use is UNIDATA, this is a IBM
product. Just an example for our website integration we use REDBACK to
make calls and get the information we need.”

Does anyone have any ideas here? Could I possible use this UNIDATA
database with Rails? Does anyone have any thoughts on this, or should I
tell them that Rails just isn;t applicable to this type of
architecture? Thank you.

2

Hi Ike,

I think Rails running on UniData would be pretty cool, however you
cannot do it out of the box right now. You can access UniData using
SQL, for example using JDBC/ODBC so the first step would probably be
writing a db adapter for it, maybe this could help:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/New+database+adapter

Also, there might be some quirks with the SQL UniData takes, so that
has to be accounted for. I haven’t used it for a long time but there
is something non-standard in the way @ID (the default primary key
column) is handled in UniData. Also, if you are wanting to access any
legacy tables (ie anything with multivalues), you’ll have to do the
necessary mapping or go through a stored procedure.

Hope this helps, and good luck.

Thanks,
Abdullah