In my recent project, I had to serialize a Hash into my SQLite database. Then I realised the need to search on that column. Upon doing some research, I found that searching a serialized hash column is very inefficient. There was a better way of going about this: using PostgreSQL Hstore! What's a hacker to do? I quickly started to migrate my SQLite database to PostgreSQL.

Found this Railscast which really helped. But there are a few nasty suprises which I'd like to put out here for anyone going through this.

The real problem starts during the process of pulling data from SQLite database with Taps. This gem provides a taps command that will help serve the one database and also pull data from it into another. First we have to serve our current SQLite database by passing taps a path to the database and also set a username and password. Then we can pull the data from this database into our Postgres database.

However after running this command I got an error that read something like this:

taps cannot load such file -- sqlite3 (LoadError)

Huh? After hours of frustration I found that Taps depends on rack version 1.0.1.

Solution

Added the this to Gemfile

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'rack',’1.0.1’

Then on Terminal run this…

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bundle update rack

Taps will now successfully pull data from SQLite into Postgres.