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In our rails app we sometimes have db entries created by users that we'd like to make part of our dev environment, without exporting the whole table. So, we'd like to be able to have a special 'dev and testing' dump.

Any recommended best practices? mysqldump seems pretty cumbersome, and we'd like to pull in rails associations as well, so maybe a rake task would make more sense.

Ideas?

Andrew Cholakian
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3 Answers3

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You could use an ETL tool like Pentaho Kettle. Once you have initial transformation setup that you want you could easily run it with different parameters in the future. This way you could also keep all your associations. I wrote a little blurb about Pentaho for another question here.

If you provide a rough schema I could probably help you get started on what your transformation would look like.

Community
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rwilliams
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I had a similar need and I ended up creating a plugin for that. It was developed for Rails 2.x and worked fine for me, but I didn't have much use for it lately.

The documentation is lacking, but it's pretty simple. You basically install the plugin and then have a method to_sql available on all your models. Options are explained in README.

You can try it out and let me know if you have any issues, I'll try to help.

Dima Sabanin
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  • Very cool code. It choked on some of our weirder associations however, so I wound up handrolling a simple script to do what we needed. More manual work, but probably the simplest approach. – Andrew Cholakian Nov 26 '10 at 06:43
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I'd go after it using a Rails runner script. That will allow your code to access the same things your Rails app would, including the database initializations. ActiveRecord will be able to take advantage of the model relationships you've defined.

Create some "transfer" tables in your production database and copy the desired data into those using the "runner" script. From there you could serialize the data, or use a dump tool, since you'll be dealing with a reduced amount of records. Reverse the process in the development environment to move the data into the database.

I had a need to populate the database in one of my apps from remote web logs and wrote a runner script that fired off periodically via cron, ftps the data from my site and inserts the data.

the Tin Man
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