anybody tried this? care to share your experiences?

In my experience, it works very well. You’ll need to download the ADO adapter, but after that it’s smooth sailing. Migrations even work well. I’ve used it within rails apps as well as stand-alone Ruby scripts w/ AR. I’ve only used it with SQL 2000.

You can do it with the ADO adapter or just create an ODBC DSN and call the DSN. This method is preferred if you actually plan to deploy the program on a Linux server, since the ADO method works only on Windows.