[atldev]

I recently launched a small project (http://statusdashboard.com) with the goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure (particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always better to understand how the magic happens).

Heroku definitely hides the complexity of their "magic". It just seems to work so effortlessly.

However, my biggest question so far is this: what is the best practice for managing and maintaining the DB? I'm used to jumping into the db for routine tasks, ad-hoc reporting, and troubleshooting. Amazon RDS would make it easier, but a bit pricy for my needs right now. I also understand you can db pull, but I've heard a few examples of data loss when attempting a pull/push roundtrip with a local PostgreSQL instance. So, I find myself spending time in the Heroku console, manipulating the data in code, manually.

What do you do to manage/report on data in the DB? I'm preparing to launch a number of larger projects, but need to get a better system in place first.

[eddie_catflap]

Hi - as an aside - I think it would be worth adding some 'tour' pages to your status dashboard site. I like the design but I'm not sure how the site works etc.

[atldev]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on that this weekend. I'm thinking of including a short video as well.