Multiple databases in Rails

Question

Can this be done? In a single application, that manages many projects with SQLite. What I want is to have a different database for each project my app is managing.. so multiple copies of an identically structured database, but with different data in them. I'll be choosing which copy to use base on params on the URI.

This is done for 1. security.. I'm a newbe in this kind of programming and I don't want it to happen that for some reason while working on a Project another one gets corrupted.. 2. easy backup and archive of old projects

Answer 1

Rails by default is not designed for a multi-database architecture and, in most cases, it doesn't make sense at all. But yes, you can use different databases and connections.

Here's some references:

• ActiveRecord: Connection to multiple databases in different models
• Multiple Database Connections in Ruby on Rails
• Magic Multi-Connections

Answer 2

You should also check out this project called DB Charmer: http://kovyrin.net/2009/11/03/db-charmer-activerecord-connection-magic-plugin/

DbCharmer is a simple yet powerful plugin for ActiveRecord that does a few things:

1. Allows you to easily manage AR models’ connections (switch_connection_to method)
2. Allows you to switch AR models’ default connections to a separate servers/databases
3. Allows you to easily choose where your query should go (on_* methods family)
4. Allows you to automatically send read queries to your slaves while masters would handle all the updates.
5. Adds multiple databases migrations to ActiveRecord