Ensuring consistent data for multiple developers using Heroku and Postgres

Question

I am working on a team of 4 developers building a Rails application deployed on Heroku. We are currently using Sqlite on our development machines and Postgres for staging (on Heroku). Because of how a certain part of our application works it is necessary for all developers to have the same data while developing.

In our staging application we create these records that are then pushed up to a test Solr cluster. The problem then comes when we are developing locally we hit the same test cluster and the IDs that exist there don't match the IDs of the records in our local Sqlite tables and we need to be able to tie a Solr result back to a table record.

One thought we had was to convert over to Postgres for development (which we should have done already anyway), export data from Heroku and import into our local DB tables. While I believe this approach will work just fine. I was wondering if anyone else has encountered a similar problem and what approach they took to solve it.

Thanks for any and all help.

Answer 1

I actually just encountered this issue last night; I did actually convert my local database to be postgres as well. Specifically with Heroku, using PG Backups and importing into my local copy is almost trivial. This was my first time using PostGres, so coming from a new experience, I couldn't imagine it being any easier. My co-worker and I have now can use identical data which, like yours, is a requirement.