NOOB - How do I query other databases for data

Hi All,

I’m trying to wrap me head around how I could use Rails for a particular
app that I’ll be designing that involves multiple legacy databases that
I’ll need to query and update. Basically, it’s a financial services
type of app where a customer will log in and be able to check/manage the
varied types of accounts that they have. Sounds simple enough right.
The issue is that these accounts are stored on multiple systems that are
a mix of DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, and Oracle. The varied systems are
because the company has gone through several acquisitions over the last
decade and inherited all of these apps. We want to tie them all
together so we don’t have to keep shuffling customers around from dept
to dept.

I was thinking that I could use Rails, but I can’t get past how I can do
anything more than create a basic application that authenticates users
and maybe have a lookup type of table that contains all of the users’
account numbers that they have on each system. Creating web services to
talk to each system or putting in some kind of messaging system (MQ,
Sonic, etc) is not an option either - not sure how to hook Rails into a
messaging system anyway.

Oh ya, here’s another dimension to the problem - some of the apps have
multiple dbs that might contain a particular user’s account (one
acquisition had separate dbs (same schemas) for each of 4 regions they
split the country up into).

I come from a Java background and I can see how I can do this with
Hibernate (and take your pick of any of the popular Java MVC
frameworks), but after looking at Rails, I hope that there might be a
better way.

I know this post was long and if you made it here - thanks for at least
reading this far. I’m not sure how I could use Rails to make this
happen, but I’d like to try.

Thanks in advance

Arthur