Better Rails SQL Migrations

Some people on our team, including me, write raw SQL in Ruby on Rails migrations. But they can get unwieldy when iterating on a complex migration that does multiple things.

Mitigate this is to break up your statements into separate HERDOCs, like so:

def up
  execute <<-SQL
    update pixaxes set metal = 'diamond' where metal = 'iron';
    -- many things...
  SQL

  execute <<-SQL
    update swords set metal = 'diamond' where metal = 'iron';
    -- many more things...
  SQL
end

If the migration fails, we'll get an error pointing to the specific problematic HEREDOC, instead of essentially 'the entire statement is invalid'. You then put a debugger between any HEREDOC to iterate on the issue.

h/t Jack Christensen