The Buckblog

After nearly 2 years, I’m happy to announce the release of a new version of sqlite3-ruby. This version is primarily a bug-fix release, so don’t expect lots of new goodies, but it does vastly improve the stability of the sqlite3 bindings for Ruby.

To install:

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gem install sqlite3-ruby

There’s even a precompiled binary gem for you Windows users. (Boy, the world would be a lot less complicated if that OS just went away…I spent about as much time just building that Windows gem as I did applying the patches and fixing all the bugs below, but that’s a rant for another day.)

Two of the most significant things you should note:

• The DL (pure-ruby) driver has been deprecated. I will no longer be maintaining that driver, and it will be removed altogether in a future release. Honestly, though, there is very little reason why you should be using it. It is quite buggy, mostly due to the limitations of Ruby’s DL library.
• The SWIG dependency that bit so many users before is gone. I now bundle the generated C file, so it should build fine even if you don’t have SWIG installed.

The list of fixed bugs, more or less in order of severity:

• Sylvain Joyeux submitted (a long time ago, to my great chagrin) a patch that fixed various problems with the different callbacks (busy_handler, set_authorize, and trace). If you were experiencing problems with sqlite3 crashing randomly, this might very well solve those for you.
• When using type translation with results that had typeless columns, an exception would be raised. This includes queries with “count(*)”, or even the pragma queries like “table_info”. No more! Queries with typeless columns are now handled safely.
• Prepared statements are automatically reset when you bind new variables to them. Before, the statement was not reset until it was called again, which made reusing statements problematic.
• Some exceptions were not being caught inside a transaction, which was causing the transaction to commit, instead of roll back. This is now fixed.
• Bignum values may now be bound in a prepared statement. Before, you’d get errors about “Bignum being too large for a long”.
• When a database cannot be created, you’ll now get more detailed error information, such as “file could not be found”. Before, the error was just a generic “the database could not be opened”.
• There were lots of warning messages that showed up when running ruby with the “-w” flag. Almost all of those have been fixed. (One, that I’m aware of, remains, but it is due to the SWIG bindings, and I’m not sure how to work around it.)

And, lastly, one (minor) new feature: Before this release, if you used named placeholders for bind variables, you had to refer to them with the colon character:

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db.execute "select * from users where user_name = :user",
    ":user" => "mrmacho"

Now, you can leave the colon off, or even use a symbol:

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db.execute "select * from users where user_name = :user",
  "user" => "mrmacho"

# or

 db.execute "select * from users where user_name = :user",
  :user => "mrmacho"

So, there you have it. Enjoy!