> i don't have to look at the database to know which properties a model has I just pop open db/schema.rb and then search for where the users table schema is d

> i don't have to look at the database to know which properties a model has I just pop open db/schema.rb and then search for where the users table schema is described. This .rb file is automatically generated. In production systems, I actually configure it to use db/schema.sql which stores the SQL schema instead of the Ruby schema, since my production database has indexes that Rail's migrations can't describe directly. Or even more directly: psql -c '\d users' Which I typically run from vim: :!psql -c '\d users' And that just prints out the description of the table for me.