Alexc,

>I am tempted to fill in the missing bits of this existing adapter, as I

find them as I would like

>to use rails for a new system but access an existing firebird db.

I don't know what is the best way to improve Firebird support in Ruby
and Rails.

The official Firebird adapter for Rails is not maintained and the
unofficial (fb_lib_adapter) miss support for ActiveRecord migrations,
Firebird connectors (fireruby and fb_lib) are hard to deploy on Windows
because they are not updated to use the right msvcrt version.

I think we should rewrite an official Firebird connector in pure ruby
and maintain the official ActiveRecord adapter. But I also think that
Firebird should provide a Sequel Adapter and a Datamapper Adapter, two
ORM useable with Merb and other Rails competitors.

The 31 char identifier limitation is also a problem we should handle in
ORM adapters to allow rails users to switch to Firebird backend without
changing their code. For instance, when you add a reference to another
model with has_one, has_many, belongs_to or has_and_belongs_to_many,
ActiveRecord automatically use fields for foreign keys that may be
longer than 31 chars so these foreign key fields declarations have to be
manually overloaded to fit in Firebird bounds.

Regards,

--
Pierre Yager