Rails and Microsoft Sql Server

So you want to connect your rails application to Microsoft SQL Server. The following instructions will take you through setting this up quite simply. This setup is on a a Ubuntu 8.04 server connecting to SQL Server 2000 (we will use the Northwind sample database). The first thing you need to do is install the following gems:

$ gem install dbi --version 0.4.0
$ gem install dbd-odbc --version 0.2.4
$ gem install rails-sqlserver-2000-2005-adapter -s http://gems.github.com

More info can be found on the sqlserver adapter gem development page. This is just the first step. Read the rest of this entry »

Costs Using Amazon EC2 & S3

Figuring out all the costs when hosting on EC2 using S3 storage can be tricky. This is break down of what you can approximately expect to pay using a few basic scenarios, such as a lamp server and S3 backups, with Amazon services. This will also compare the costs to what you would expect to pay if you want to do the hosting yourself.

To fully understand EC2 charges, you need to know the difference between the instance types and what they cost to best meet your requirements. For the purpose of this post I will summarize – I have converted the Amazon Compute Units into basic CPU power and will then detail the costs based upon each of these instances.
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Installing the Mysql Gem

This is just a self reminder. I always seem to forget the dev package that is required to build the mysql gem. Failure to install this results in all kinds of headaches:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev

Then install the gem and you are all set:

sudo gem install mysql

Shrinking a Sql Server Transaction Log

Here is a good post that has detailed how to shrink the Microsoft SQL Server tranasaction log using DBCC Shrinkfile. Having had to do this many times, it is nice to see it detailed so simply. For perpetuity I have copied the directions below, but full credit goes to David for posting this.

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Simple Script to Backup Smaller MYSQL Databases remotely

Here is a simple script you can use to add as a job that you can use to backup smaller remote MYSQL DB’s.  This script will take a mysql dump, date it, then add it to an archive (with the date), then the uncompressed file is deleted.  It is perfect to use as a daily cronjob. The instructions are specifically for Ubuntu, but it can be easily modified for Unix or even a Windows batch file.

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