At a previous gig we wanted to have a regular scrubbed snapshot of our production Heroku database for dev and QA work. We didn't want unscrubbed data to hit a d

At a previous gig we wanted to have a regular scrubbed snapshot of our production Heroku database for dev and QA work. We didn't want unscrubbed data to hit a developer's laptop, both because it contained PII and because it was huge. The nightly process we ended up with (after a lot of iteration) was: 1. fork the production db and wait for it to sync 2. run a task within the production Heroku app pointing at the new fork which does the PII scrubbing and compacting[1] 3. `pg_dump` the compressed result onto the Heroku dyno running the task above 4. upload the dump as a release on the GitHub page for our main codebase When a developer wanted a fresh dev database all they had to do was run a local rake task that would grab the db dump from the latest GitHub release, drop their local database, and restore the dump. [1]: This isn't as easy as it sounds because one of the tables we wanted to compress contained raw financial data, but we wanted a coherent story for dev, so we dropped 95% of the data, keeping more recent stuff, randomized all the amounts, and then recalculated summary tables.