How "pending" is support for SQL Server in DO?

[Nikolai Weibull]

The README states that support for SQL Server in DO is pending for
MRI, but JRuby has, well, support for it. What does that mean? Is it
simply a question of all the hoops you have to go through to get there
for MRI (that is, installing freeTDS and the ODBC bindings)?

[Alex Coles]

No, unfortunately pending means that although parts of it are working,
the MRI SQL Server driver is not passing our shared spec suite. Its
written in Ruby (as opposed to our other drivers, which are written in
C or Java), so it should be fairly straightforward if anyone on the
list is interested in submitting patches.

The stack (FreeTDS + DBI + DBD + RubyODBC) is brittle and can take a
while to get going with. I spent quite a few hours getting it working
on Snow Leopard.. although I've documented the process involved...

This isn't currently a v. high-priority item to finish, but if there
is interest from users on the ML, then please add a note to the ticket
(http://datamapper.lighthouseapp.com/projects/20609-datamapper/tickets?q=sql+server+)
tracking this issue, so we can prioritise our time.

As an aside, it'll be faster and easier in most cases to add support
for new relational databases on JRuby, rather than MRI. Java already
has a standard database API (JDBC) and we have a shared library
(do_jdbc) that does most of the heavy lifting, bridging DO's API and
JDBC.

Alex