If you must use Oracle and Ruby on OSX Lion do it with JRuby

The Oracle 64-bit client has not worked since OSX Lion was released in 2011. This is a problem as Ruby on Lion is 64-bit. Rather than recompiling Ruby to be 32-bit its much easier to run JRuby and use a jdbc connection string.

A sample database.yml

:adapter  => 'jdbc',
:driver   => 'oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver',
:url      => 'jdbc:oracle:thin:@your.oracle.server.com:1521/something.world',
:username => 'user',
:password => 'password'