Ruby on Rails
HowtoConnectToOracle

• a tnsnames.ora with an entry named ‘orcl’
• a user named ‘username’
• with a password ‘password’
• your database is on localhost
• ruby-oci8
• Note: Oracle does not have Intel Mac driversOracle now has an Intel Mac Driver
• Other Platform Specific Issues
• When developing for Oracle, on a Intel Mac, consider using Postgress as the development environment db platform. DatabaseDrivers

Your config/database.yml will look something like:

development:
   adapter:oci
   database: orcl
   host:
   username: username
   password: password

• It works even if your database is on a remote host (configured in tnsnames, requires a listener is running on remote host).
• I had to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Path/to/$ORACLE_HOME/lib to make the oci driver work on Linux.

At least in AR 1.10.1, the OCI adapter doesn’t use database, it uses host, so that should be:

development:
  adapter: oci
  database:
  host: orcl
  username: username
  password: password

If you don’t have a tnsnames.ora configured for your environment, and you are using the 10g instantclient install, you can specify a connect string for the host parameter. Example:

development:
  adapter: oci
  host: //server.example.com:port/instance_name
  username: username
  password: password

Note: Make sure you Install Active Record. gem install activerecord
Note: Please make sure that the ruby/OCI8 driver(http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-oci8/) is installed or else an AdapterNotFound exception will be thrown when starting the web server

THIS IS THE PLACE TO GO FOR MAC >
http://creativi.st/blog/articles/2005/06/25/rails-oracle-client-on-mac-os-x

Newer instructions for Intel Macs Better new instructions for Intel Macs (using the new Intel Mac Oracle InstantClient)

just remember to do this also, so your “ruby.h” (ruby header file) is found for the ‘make’ command.

cd /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0
sudo ln -s ../universal-darwin8.0/* ./

found here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/76928193a89bd420/5b7d897c4316a6d0

- Grant Aaron

- Rails 1.0.0
- activerecord (1.13.2)
- Oracle 90 client with configured TNSNAMES.ora
- Default MSQL DB in 'database.yml'
- ruby/OCI8 driver for windows
- Oracle Database connection defined in my object model:
class Stream < ActiveRecord::Base
    establish_connection({
       :adapter  => "oci",
       :host => "SID.COMPANY.NET",       
       :username => "user",
       :password => "pass" 
    })
    set_table_name "mytable" 
end

Your issue had nothing to do with using establish_connection over database.yml. My bet would be that if you pulled your establish connection back out into database.yml it will work fine now. Rails uses database.yml to load a variable called RAILS_ENV which is (by default) read from in establish_connection. All you did (too much work) was overwrite establish_connection to do this manually.

Using ‘oracle’ rather than ‘oci’ as an adapter

(Full article here)

If you want to use the ‘new’ oracle adapter rather than oci and you want to use host/SID style of database server reference you have to use ‘database’ rather than ‘host’, see [PATCH] Rename oracle_adapter, keep up w/ the Joneses for more details. – AndrewBeacock

i2 on Rails