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As part of working with Notes for so long, I have been an IBM Business Partner for years. Among other things, that means I have access to internal-use software, including DB2. So naturally, I wanted to use DB2 with Rails. Fortunately, Antonio Cangiano and his team have developed one http://antoniocangiano.com/category/db2/page/5/ and http://db2onrails.com. Unfortunately I've had no end of grief actually getting it to work properly. Sure, I can read and write to DB2, but Migrations are problematic, and in the end the 8-character table name restriction drove me nuts.
On a much earlier project, I had the opportunity to work with Oracle. It was not a happy experience. Circa 1995, the tools for Oracle were pretty slow and buggy. This influenced my opinion of the database itself. Since PostgreSQL is similar in some respects to Oracle, this put me off PostgreSQL.
Since I had done quite a bit of work with ASP and SQLServer, I should probably have considered using SQLServer. In fact, I have just become a Microsoft Business Partner, so again, the software is free for internal use. I must admit I didn't even consider it. Somehow it just wouldn't seem proper to use a highly proprietary database with an open-source development and production environment. Also, I've seen very few references to a SQLServer adaptor for Rails™.
There are lots of other choices out there, depending on one's database prejudices; I suppose any of them can be made to work. There's even an Adaptor for FileMaker Pro http://sixfriedrice.com/wp/products/rfm which my business partner has encouraged me to use. It turns out that you can basically forget about using Active Record with this one, so once I discovered that, I didn't pursue it further.
So that takes us full circle to MySQL. It is after all the database that Rails™ was developed on. I downloaded it, installed it on my HP TC1100 tablet, downloaded a "free" GUI front-end for it http://www.webyog.com/en/index.php, and haven't looked back.
So why did I install a MySQL server (not to mention a full Ruby/Rails/IDE configuration) on a Tablet PC? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was short of servers that could host the MySQL. I have 2 development/test servers running. One is my Domino server, which also runs SQLServer. The other runs DB2 to support the Mobile Edge server from iEnterprises http://www.ienterprises.com/wireless-crm. I don't like the idea of an incestuous situation between databases, so my rule is one per box (OK, Domino and SQLServer on one box is pushing it....). It turns out that the TC1100, with only 768MB RAM, runs MySQL Server just fine. In any case, this is a temporary situation. I have a perfectly good IBM X345 2U server sitting in my server/furnace room, decommissioned from running our corporate websites for almost 4 years. It's currently being configured for Linux/Apache/MySQL/Ruby. More on that later.
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