If one searched for Oracle and Rails they're bound to turn up a bunch of results that appear to indicate that Oracle is on the Rails bandwagon. How Web2.0 of them. (I'm trying to think of some funny snide remark about a rails acquisition, but can't really....)
Apparently someone failed to tell Oracle that the IDE for Rails, TextMate only runs on MacOSX. And MacOSX only runs (legally) on Apple Hardware. And it's been what almost two years now that Apple hardware went to x86. Oracle DO YOU KNOW THAT?
Ok, the purpose of this rant is to show how 2 sided (or out of touch) Oracle is. If you happen to need to get the Oracle Instant Client for Mac OSX to work on a MacTel machine (say if you need python or ruby or perl to access the database, or even to do Rails work), you are out of luck! Sadly it doesn't indicate that the downloads are PPC ONLY! (NOTE: This is no longer the case ;) ). But a little more digging will show that Oracle isn't planning to release drivers until after 11g comes out. (I really do feel sad for the OTN guy trying to make the MacTel users feel like Oracle actually cares (or listens). I don't envy his job.) How hard can it really be to make the drivers work on x86? Had this been an open source project it would've been done years ago. (Or I could go fix it at least). Here with a proprietary vendor, I'm at their mercy, and I can't do anything about it! How un Web2.0 of them!
(The other purpose of this rant is to note that getting python(sqlalchemy) to talk to Oracle from MacTel is a no go right now)