Robot Has No Heart

This took me a while to figure out, especially since I’m not so great with either windows or SQL server, but in the end the process isn’t so difficult.

Rails 3, Ruby 1.9.2, Windows 2008, and SQL Server 2008 Screencast

The steps covered in this screencast are:

1. Create user
2. Create database
3. Give user permissions
4. Create DSN
5. Install ruby
6. Install devkit (Needed to complie native extensions for ODBC)
7. Create a new rails app
8. Add activerecord-sqlserver-adapter and ruby-odbc to Gemfile
9. Customize config/database.yml

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# config/database.yml
development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  dsn: testdsn_user
  mode: odbc
  database: test
  username: xavier
  password:

Some errors you may encounter:

The specified module could not be found – odbc.so You have likely copied odbc.so from i386-msvcrt-ruby-odbc.zip. This is for 1.8.7, and does not work for 1.9. Remove the .so file, and install ruby-odbc as above.

The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and the Application. Perhaps you have created a system DSN. Try creating a user DSN instead. I also found some suggestions that you need to use a different version of the ODBC configuration panel, but this wasn’t relevant for me.