We've pretty much reached the conclusion that ActiveRecord::Base.all, or .find(:all) if you prefer, should never be used without conditionals. If you want to iterate over every record in the table, you should use my custom .foreach method ( Read more... )

Little did I know that ActiveRecord doesn't have a truly iterative way for dealing with results. You get the find method, with its various incantations of :all, :first, :limit, etc, but there's not way to iterate over every record in turn without slurping the result set into memory first ( Read more... )

Because I keep forgetting this trick, I'm documenting it here so I don't forget. To install ruby-oci8 on Ubuntu (and possibly other unixy platforms) do this:

sudo env ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME gem install ruby-oci8 -v 1.0.7
Drop the "-v 1.0.7" if you want the latest version of ruby-oci8, but keep in mind that the latest version is in the 2.x range ( Read more... )

I discovered that a few reports on the new RHEL server failed this morning with, "ORA-03134: Connections to this server version are no longer supported ( Read more... )

Could your company switch from a commercial database to an OSS database? Are you sure? Are you *really* sure? Do you *really* know the differences between your COTS database's capabilities versus your OSS database of choice?

I'm probably not going to make it to OSCON this year, but if there's one talk I *really* want to see it's this one. No, ( Read more... )