Has anyone thought about having a fourth database, maybe called template. e.g. foo_template, foo_development, foo_test, and foo_production.
The rake db:migrate would be done to the template database. Then the test and development would be initially populated from the template.
I am not sure if all databases have this ability. I'm using postgresql. I can do:
createdb --template=foo_template foo_test
There are a couple of reasons.
First, if I add a procedural language to my development database, then I can not create the test db without some sort of error unless I use postgres as the user of the test database. I'd prefer not to do that. Either using ruby or sql as the schema_format has difficulties. Using ruby, the constraints are not saved; using sql, I get a couple of ugly warnings.
The second reason is my migrations add required data to the database. Neither method of db:test:clone or db:test:clone_structure migrates these entries. Using fixtures solves this but then I need this same fixture for all of my tests.
It also appears to be faster and dumping things to a file and sucking them back up.
Perry
