You could run a Rake task to update the db. The proper way to do this would be to write a rake task, but the easiest way to get going would be to use the provided rake task db:seed. This runs the file db/seeds.rb in the context of the application, so that all the ActiveRecord stuff is automatically available. To run the rake task you just cd /path/to/rails/application rake db:seed or if you want it to run on the production db RAILS_ENV=production rake db:seed which could be run from a cron task or whatever is appropriate.
So all you need do is to put your code in db/seeds.rb and you will be up and running.
Colin
