Switching your Rails Database from SQLite3 to PostgreSQL or MySQL

I deployed a minimal new Rails application I wrote over a period of a couple of hours and started testing it with valid production data.  It's basically a very simple CRUD application for a very specific audience.  Very basic stress testing (using Apache's ab) showed me that it didn't work well when requests were coming in with concurrency > 2. I realized I'd started the project using SQLite3 as the database and that's probably where the bottleneck is since it can handle requests with a concurrency of 1 just fine.  The application is deployed using mod_passenger (my first experience with it) and is configured to never tear down application instances due to idle timeouts.  With 6 application instances listening, a concurrency of 6 should have been a cinch.

In any case, now that I need to switch it to using a real database like PostgreSQL or MySQL, there were no obvious solutions that would allow me to keep the data I already had in my production database.  Everything out there talks about going from development to test to production each of which environments gets their own schema but nothing else.  Migrations allow you to keep your production data in place but that's not the same as dumping it and loading it.  Using database-specific dump/load utilities might result in SQL that needs to be tweaked before it can be loaded into another database type.

In comes the Yaml Db plugin by Orion Henry and Adam Wiggins.  It does exactly what one would expect.  Similar to the way schema.db is database-agnostic, the Yaml Db has a database-agnostic dump format and a similar load format.  One of the specific use cases mentioned on that site is "One common use would be to switch your data from one database backend to another."

Excellent!  Btw, thank you George for the tip!  You know who you are :)

Spaces in /etc/fstab

I needed to mount a Samba share from my windows gaming / media center PC to my MythTV backend so I could navigate to all my videos from a single location instead of having to worry about which server they were on.  To that end I shared out the Videos folder from my account on the Windows PC.  Since my user on the Windows PC is "Shahbaz Javeed" that presented a problem when trying to auto-mount it using fstab on my MythTV host - spaces aren't allowed in any field of /etc/fstab.  Any spaces are considered field delimiters.  The solution is to escape all spaces with \040.  My /etc/fstab entry now looks like so:

//frey/Users/Shahbaz\040Javeed/Videos   /var/lib/mythtv/videos/frey cifs     guest,ro       0       0

This works swimmingly!