“Loading data in migrations”

I found migrations to be very useful tool to maintain data structures in a rails project. It is clean, easy to understand and fast when it comes to recreate a database.

During develoment, I faced several times the same problem: “How to import static data into the database?” Of course, one can create fixture and load it. But sometimes one needs more powerful tool.

So, I tried to import the data in the migrations themselves. Since the data to import was huge (tens of MBs), I did try several methods and approaches. Here is the result.

Fixtures in Migrations

This is method that I found on the web in an article of Adam Christensen Loading Fixtures in a Migration.
It shows how to load the fixtures file into database.

require 'active_record/fixtures'<br /><br />class CreateCategories < ActiveRecord::Migration<br />  def self.up<br />    create_table :categories do |t|<br />      t.column :name, :string<br />    end<br /><br />    Fixtures.create_fixtures(’test/fixtures’, File.basename(”categories.yml”, ‘.*’))<br />  end<br />  def self.down<br />    drop_table :categories<br />  end<br />end<br /><br /><br />