title: Connecting Rails 3.1 with Multiple Databases
body: <p>At ShowNearby we have been doing a very big migration to RoR 3.1 from PHP and we are facing several problems that may be some of you have solved before. </p>
  
  <p>We have big amounts of data and we decided to segregate our DB into several DBs that we can handle separately. For example, our accounts, places, logs and others are split into several databases</p>
  
  <p>We need to get migrations, fixtures, models, to play nicely, and so far it has been quite messy. Some of our requirements for a solution to be acceptable:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>one model should relate to one tables in one of the databases.</li>
  <li>rake db:drop - should drop all the database env we specify in database.yml</li>
  <li>rake db:create - should create all the database env we specify in database.yml</li>
  <li>rake db:migrate - should run migrations to the various databases</li>
  <li>rake db:test - should grab fixtures and drop them into the various databases and test unit/function/etc</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>We are considering setting separate rails projects per each database and connecting them with ActiveResource, but we feel this is not very efficient. Have any of you deal with a similar problem before?</p>