Recently I had to liberate some data from an old MS Access DB, so I discovered a gem of a Ruby gem called " sequel " that generalizes database access (for many different databases) - ORM style. Most excellent, so I figured I wanted to run it on my raspberry pi to access various sqlite databases I have lying around. Assuming you already have ruby (1.9) installed, you can simply do (in any Debian flavored Linux, for that matter): sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev and sudo gem install sequel sqlite3 So now one can fire up irb and do things like: require 'sequel' db = Sequel.sqlite('some_db.db') Etc . (This will, of course, not let you access MS Access DBs on your pi, as they rely on the "win32ole" gem - only available on windows, and the " Microsoft Access Database Engine " - also only available on windows. More info on how to connect to those kinds of database can be found here - under 'ado'.)
A series of notes to myself.