Creating a development db from existing db

Rails
#1

Hi there,

I would like to copy the schema and data from an existing database and
create a development db with the schema and data.

Is this possible? - I have heard of doing a ‘schema dump’, what about a
data dump. The data in the existing db is important - I worry that doing
something could delete the data. Is this fear unfounded?

Chris.

#2

Chris F. wrote:

Is this possible? - I have heard of doing a ‘schema dump’, what about a
data dump. The data in the existing db is important - I worry that doing
something could delete the data. Is this fear unfounded?

What we’ve done here is use a plugin called ar_fixtures which allows you
to dump the data corresponding to a model. So we’ve taken a copy of the
production data from the legacy app, renamed the tables and fields in
SQL to correspond with our model, and then use “rake db:fixtures:dump
MODEL=Product” to create a fixture for that model. This is then simple
to reload (after a migration/recreation) through “rake
db:fixtures:load”.

d

#3

Is the development db going to be on a different system than the
existing db? If so, you could just backup your existing db and then
restore it as a new db on your development system.

If you’re using MySQL, backups and restores can be performed with
MySQL Administrator.

Hope this helps.

Dan