Getting these two things to work together was not trivial. Here's a handy guide to save you some time. Using mysql2 gem is kind of mandatory if you plan on using UTF-8 extensively without running into "incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8" -issue all the time.
Here is what you have to do.
- pre-reqs: Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0
- Remove libmysql.dll from c:\path-to-ruby\bin which can be there to fix this problem
- Remove mysql gem: gem remove mysql2
- Install Ruby Devkit from http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
- Install MySQL C Connector from http://www.mysql.com/downloads/connector/c/
- Copy over file c:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Connector C 6.0.2\lib\opt\libmysql.dll to c:\path-to-ruby\bin
- Install MySQL2 gem with gem install -v "0.2.11" mysql2 -- '--with-mysql-lib="C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Connector C 6.0.2\lib\opt" --with-mysql-include="C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Connector C 6.0.2\include"'
- Change adapter from "mysql" to "mysql2" in your database.yml
- Change the line: gem 'mysql' to gem 'mysql2', "0.2.11" in your Gemfile
- Run bundle install
Make sure to follow Devkit's instructions when installing it. It should say "expanding PATH temporarily to include Devkit" when you are installing gems with C bindings like mysql. Also make sure you are using 32-bit versions of MySQL C Connector.
I'm not sure but the MySQL Server should ship with includes and libraries too. If you want to use them instead of the Connector, just point --with-mysql-include and --with-mysql-lib to correct directories, and make sure to copy MySQL Server's version of libmysql.dll to Ruby's binary folder.
You don't need -v "0.2.11" in the gem command line if you are using Rails 3.1 instead of 3.0.x.
