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December 29, 2005

Windows XP and Ruby on Rails

Just a quick "how did I?" on making it so I could use PostgreSQL and MySQL on my Windows XP laptop with Ruby.

I was writing an application for work using the ActiveState Komodo IDE that parses e-mails in preparation for inserting them into a database. I knew that no matter how I connected to the database, I would need to do proper quoting so there wouldn't be any "surprises" with the data I inserted.

I ended up going with using a module that is part of Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord (many of its functions automatically do the quoting). When I installed that, MySQL worked fine out of the box. For PostgreSQL I also had to also install postgres-pr.

I leveraged gem to load both. I am using the precompiled version of Ruby you can get by following the download links on their web site...and other MySQL/PostgreSQL options were complicated by their complile environment being different than mine...so anything that required a compilation was pretty much out of the picture.

Either way, without going into the specific items I tried that failed, you can read above what I did that succeeded :-)

Posted by alan at 4:42 PM