Question

I am attempting to make a simple connection to a remote database. I can not seem to get it to work.

remote_db = DBI.connect('DBI:ODBC:remote-host','user','password')
remote_db.table { |table| pp table }

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is Ruby DBI.
http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/

Here is an example of using DBI for ODBC connectivity:

# Require in the DBI files<br />
require 'DBI'

# create an ODBC connection instance<br />
dbi_conn = DBI.connect('DBI:ODBC:datasource','your_username','your_password')

# query tables available  <br />
dbi_conn.tables

# returns an array with the results from a table TABLE:<br />
array_out = dbi_conn.select_all('SELECT * FROM TABLE')

some more in-depth info:
http://www.kitebird.com/articles/ruby-dbi.html

Or, alternatively, you can use ruby-odbc:
http://odbc-rails.rubyforge.org/