accessing a database from ruby using an odbc driver (Remedy)

Question

I have the Remedy odbc driver installed on my machine. I am able to pull down data from Remedy via excel just fine specifying this driver in my connection.

Is there any way I could use this driver from within Ruby / Ruby on rails to connect to and read from the DB?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

I have not found a way to use the Remedy ODBC driver from Ruby. Also, I am suspecting that using the driver which seems to be quite antiquated and is already throwing some arcane errors when used from Excel might not be simple to use.

I was able to connect through R via RODBC and thus an R script that would pull the data for you and write to CSV might be a solution.

What I am actually using - which to my mind is the simplest way of achieving this - is talking directly to the Remedy SQL backend. All that you will have to do is parse the data upon pulling it from DB which is very easy to set up (priorities, service types, statuses are stored as integers and not actual names and timestamps are in epoch format).