Back in May, I wrote about my enthusiasm to be part of the Heroku story, and I remain just as passionate today about helping write the next chapter. I’ve had many customer meetings over the past few months, and the theme is consistent — you want to know where we are taking Heroku. We want to be clear: The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku. These are companies like PensionBee, who help people manage their pensions; MX, who help small businesses with loans; Furnished Quarters, who built a portal for corporate clients booking short-term rentals; and EIGENSONNE, who built an app to connect with their...

One of the many benefits of Rails is database independence. Migrations are particularly nice in this regard; and the easy-to-read / Rubyified display of your schema (via rake db:schema:dump) in schema.rb is icing on the cake.

But what about data? For import and export of the actual data, we’re stuck with mysqldump (or pg_dump, if you’re so inclined). Further, these dump formats are not terribly readable, contain lots of information you may or may not want to copy (like permissions, schema settings, views, triggers…you know, database features that Rails users are supposed to avoid).

Worst of all, ddata dumps are vendor specific, so you can’t move data between...