RubyODBC Cannot allocate SQLHENV - sql

Question

I'm trying to connect to SQL Server on Ubuntu 9.04 using Ruby. I translated and followed all the steps outlined in getting OSX talking to SQL Server from here:
http://toolmantim.com/articles/getting_rails_talking_to_sqlserver_on_osx_via_odbc
Everything is working on the FreeTDS and unixODBC end. I can see and query the database using tsql.
When I try to access the database from Ruby using IRB I get the following error:
DBI::DatabaseError : INTERN (0) [RubyODBC] Cannot allocate SQLHENV
Has anyone run into this and what can I do to solve this?

Answer 1

I started getting this error when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Your tip regarding installation order of the Ubuntu packages didn't work for me.
It seems the fix was to manually compile ruby-odbc.
wget http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
cd ruby-odbc-0.9997
ruby extconf.rb --with-dlopen
make
sudo make install

Answer 2

System
Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit
I had to specify the odbc directory in the rubyodbc install
wget http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-odbc-0.9997.tar.gz
cd ruby-odbc-0.9997
ruby extconf.rb --with-odbc-dir=/usr/lib/odbc --disable-dlopen
make
sudo make install

Answer 3

I had the same problem.
But on Centos 5.5 not Ubuntu
Tried many forums/solutions with no joy.
The error message hints at a missing reference to unixODBC.
Which was setting using LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.
Found another way to set path, by creating
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/odbc.conf.
add unixODBC location to file ie /usr/local/lib.
Run, sudo ldconfig.

Answer 4

Go fig that I actually got this working after submitting my question. What I ended up doing was uninstall libdbd-odbc-ruby and libdbi-ruby and then reinstalling them by installing libdbi-ruby first and then installing libdbd-odbc-ruby. I guess when I installed them before, something must of messed up.

Answer 5

BTW, following the instructions to recompile Ruby-ODBC on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) required installation of either the libiodbc2-dev or the unixodbc-dev package. When using libiodbc2-dev, I got segmentation faults when my Ruby program tried:
connection.select_all('select top 15 * from log_device_healths')
..but no problem when using unixodbc-dev instead.

Answer 6

Tim Morgan's solution didn't work for me. However I was able to get things working by installing an older version of libodbc-ruby (0.9995) from here:
http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libo/libodbc-ruby/libodbc-ruby1.8_0.9995-1_i386.deb
Additional details are available from Carsten Gehling's blog:
http://gehling.dk/2010/02/the-woes-of-libodbc-ruby1-8-and-debian-ubuntu/
Be careful though -- Ubuntu's Update Manager will happily "upgrade" this version of libodbc-ruby to the broken 0.9997-2. I accidentally overwrote the older version this way only to end up back here, trying to figure out how I fixed it last time.

Answer 7

Well, it seems my other answer stopped working for me. This thread helped me to solve the issue in another way, and I wanted to share it here.
sudo gem uninstall ruby-odbc
sudo rm /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/odbc.so
cd /tmp
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libo/libodbc-ruby/libodbc-ruby1.8_0.9995-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libodbc-ruby1.8_0.9995-1_amd64.deb
If you're not on a 64-bit platform, you'll need to download a different Debian package.
Basically, what solves the problem is installing version 0.9995 of the ruby-odbc Ubuntu package.