I had exactly the same experience while trying to cook up an ad hoc test utility at our startup. I spent two days bumbling around with MRI Ruby and various gem

I had exactly the same experience while trying to cook up an ad hoc test utility at our startup. I spent two days bumbling around with MRI Ruby and various gems and C libraries -- two days of utter frustration. I eventually realized that I could easily talk to any database with a JDBC library if I switched to JRuby, and that's what I did. Like you, I was up and running in minutes.