Thanks very much!  I'll check ruby-dbi out.

Cheers,

-Roy

Robo <robo / mars.com> wrote in message news:<r%ibd.7895$mZ2.686527 / news02.tsnz.net>...
> Roy Pardee wrote:
> > Are there better libs for these things?  Are there alternatives to
> > iterating over an ADO Recordset?  Is there a native encryption lib
> > that I can feed a gpg-generated public key to for the encryption?  Any
> > and all advice would be most welcome.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > -Roy
> 
> You may like to try the ruby-dbi (http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/) for 
> accessing the database, it provides a database independent interface. 
> Even if you'll only be using mssql, I find the dbi more usable anyway.
> 
> After connecting to the db, you can basically create the tab delimited 
> file by (untested):
> 
> dbh = DBI.connect(url, user, pass)
> 
> f = File.new("dump.txt", "w+")
> sql = "SELECT..."
> dbh.execute(sql) do |result|
>    result.column_names do |col|
>      f.puts col.join("\t")
>    end
> 
>    result.fetch_array do |row|
>      f.puts row.join("\t")
>    end
> end
> f.close