Ruby/Informix is a Ruby extension for connecting to IBM Informix Dynamic Server, written in ESQL/C.

It is being developed and heavily tested on Solaris/SPARC. It has been reported to work on Linux, Windows and HP-UX.

There are four major enhancements in this release:

• Use of BigDecimal for MONEY/DECIMAL columns
• Resource management by means of blocks for statements, cursors and connnections
• Support for SLOB status and storage characteristics information gathering
• Thread safe

Along with bug fixes, more documentation and new handy methods.

Special thanks to Guy Bowerman, Jonathan Leffler and Logan Capaldo for their feedback and help.

Home page: http://ruby-informix.rubyforge.org
Download from: http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-informix/

Changelog:

0.5.0  12/27/2006
------------------
New features:
       * Easier to install
       * BigDecimal accepted for input parameters
       * BigDecimal used for instantiating DECIMAL and MONEY values
       * Cursor, Statement, Slob and Database accept an optional block that
         automatically frees resources after execution.
         Based on ideas and pseudo-code by
         Edwin Fine <emofine at finecomputerconsultants dot com> and me.
       * Database#slob shortcut for creating Slob objects.
       * Slob::Stat class implemented. Returned by Slob#stat, represents the
         SLOB status. Methods: atime, ctime, mtime, refcnt and size. Includes
         Comparable.
       * Slob new methods: <<, rewind, stat, pos, pos=, lock, unlock,
                           estbytes, extsz, flags, maxbytes, sbspace,
                           extsz=, flags=,
                           atime, ctime, mtime, refcnt and size
       * Thread safe

Remarks:
       * DECIMAL and MONEY columns are no longer returned as Float. BigDecimal
         is used instead.

Bugs fixed:
       * If there was an error reading (ifx_lo_read) an SLOB, memory
         allocated for the read buffer was not freed. Noticed by
         Edwin Fine <emofine at finecomputerconsultants dot com>
       * maxbytes option was ignored when creating an Slob object
       * Documentation for Slob mentioned an RDRW constant, but it actually
         is RDWR.