[ANN] ruby-oci8 1.0.0

[KUBO Takehiro]

ruby-oci8 1.0.0 is released. This is a Oracle module using OCI8 API.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-oci8/

This is second 1.0.0 release. I released 1.0.0 at 10:34:18 GMT.
But I noticed that a bug (7 in the what's new list) was not fixed.
I deleted it soon. But two people had downloaded. If you are the
person, please download again. Sorry...

What's new.

1. fix a BUG when binding a Bignum. This bug was added in
ruby-oci8 1.0.0-rc2. (reported by Daniel Berger)

2. add OCI8#describe_table(table_name), OCI8::Cursor#column_metadata,
OCI8::Metadata::Table, OCI8::Metadata::View and OCI8::Metadata::Column.

table information:
con = OCI8.new('username/password')
table_info = con.describe_table('table_name') #=> OCI8::Metadata::Table
table_info.columns #=> an array of OCI8::Metadata::Column.

query information:
con = OCI8.new('username/password')
csr = con.exec('select * from table_name')
csr.column_metadata #=> an array of OCI8::Metadata::Column.

5. add OCI8::BindType::BinaryDouble if oci8lib.so is compiled for
Oracle 10g client. You can fetch exactly same values in Oracle.

You could fetch the values in previous version by adding the
following line.

OCI8::BindType::Mapping[101] = OCI8::BindType::Float
(This is default in ruby-oci8 1.0.0-rc2.)

But a fetched value may not be exactly same with the value in
Oracle. That's because OCI8::BindType::Float's network
representation is Oracle NUMBER data type. A BINARY_DOUBLE
value in Oracle become NUMBER on the network and is converted
to Float on the client side. It makes a bit difference by
round-off error.

In addition, Oracle NUMBER doesn't have NaN, +Infinity and -Infinity.
You cannot fetch the values by older versions.

Note: When you bind a Float value, it is bound by
OCI8::BindType::Float by default. You have two ways to bind
it by OCI8::BindType::BinaryDouble.

a. bind explicitly.

con = OCI8.new('ruby/oci8')
csr = con.parse('insert into table_name values 1)')
csr.bind_param(1, 10.5, OCI8::SQLT_IBDOUBLE)
csr.exec

b. change the default behaviour if and only if you are sure that
the Oracle client version and Oracle server version are both
10g or upper.

# use OCI8::BindType::BinaryDouble for ruby's Float values.
OCI8::BindType::Mapping[Float] = OCI8::BindType::BinaryDouble
con = OCI8.new('ruby/oci8')
csr = con.exec('insert into table_name values 1)', 10.5)

4. OCI8::Cursor#fetch_hash accepts a block as a iterator.

5. [dbi] support external OS authentication.
(contributed by Dan Fitch)

dbh = DBI.connect('dbi:OCI8', nil, nil)

6. [dbi] add DatabaseHandle#columns and improve StatementHandle#column_info
(suggested by Venkat Pa)

7. [bug] fix a problem when binding ''(empty string) via dbi.