From http://ramsees.blogspot.com:

I did some comparitions selecting 1000, 10000 and 100000 with Ruby Fb gem, Delphi Fibplus and the FB .NET driver, here is the result:

ROWS RUBY DELPHI .NET 1000 0.12 0.47 0.09 10000 0.94 0.48 0.53 100000 10.95 3.79 5.53

The results are on milliseconds, the table is from a production database with 40 fields and about 3 million records, as you can see, native code is still the king, .NET result are quite good, but Ruby is quite dissapointing handling lots of data.