Ruby on Rails and databases

I’ve decided to start messing around with Ruby on Rails a little bit recently. I am reading Learning Rails from O’Reilly Press. I like this quote (page 178):

Because Rails works hard at staying independent of any given database implementation, migrations also offer you a convenient technique for creating your application using one database for development or testing and yet another for deployment.

Fun stuff so far. I haven’t written anything besides Perl for a long time, and even when I have written Perl it has been small systems administration scripts.

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  • Let me know how it goes. I looked at Ruby first a while ago but I don’t think I really knew what I was looking for. I’ve unfortunately settled on Java which I’ll be picking up after my Cisco classes.

  • good luck with the project!

    as far as ‘database independence’ goes — i’ve found it to be more of a talking point than anything else — there’s really just no reason to change databases mid-way through a project, or even post-deploy — that’s why people don’t do it.

    not to mention, would anyone be crazy/stupid enough to build/test on one database only to deploy on another? no.

    the importance of Rails staying ‘database-independent’ is so you can choose whatever db you like to use with Rails — not so much that you’re going to change DBs on a daily basis.

  • Peter-man: My reason is that I don’t want to spend time mucking around with figuring out how to get RoR to talk to MySQL right now, rather than just leaning RoR. RoR likes SQLite as its default. But as I understand it, you wouldn’t want to use SQLite in higher load situations, so it is good to know that in theory it might be easy to switch 🙂

  • Good to see you blogging and reading 4major, but hey what does MySOL equate to? Are you speaking some language pertaining to the sun?