Anonymize database dumps about capistrano-db-tasks HOT 2 CLOSED

@dmitry I agree with this comment. I implemented a home-grown solution at a previous company, not very elegant but following these basic ideas:

• database would be a copy from production
• all user emails replaced with <user.id>@example.com
• all password hashes replaced with nil or some garbage
• except for several internal accounts (admin, qa, and other internal users)
• transaction amounts, phone, address, etc as you have said would be replaced with dummy
• except for those linked to above internal accounts

The approach would be cleaner with this gem, but these were some of the objectives:

• I needed to dump the database on the (very secure) production environment
• did this with a nightly cron task
• this also acted as a backup
• from this dump, loaded a separate database instance (also in production)
• separate database is where the anonymizing tasks above were performed
• then dump the anonymized database to a file, and move to a separate user account location
• user account was accessible to allowed users via SSH keys within VPC
• a symlink like latest_db_dump.sql.gz was created

This left me with:

• a nightly production backup dump in a secure location not accessible to anyone other than admins
• a nightly refresh of the anonymized db that was SSH-accessible to developers, qa, etc at a known endpoint/filename
• finally, a task (like the ones in this gem) that could load the dump to replace non-production instances

Complicated, to be sure, but we were dealing with people's money, and all sorts of demanding security requirements.

Another consideration (just for completeness... :-)

When the production database gets big, it would be great (albeit hard) to take a sample of the database. Of course the problem is that you can't just take any old records -- you need a set of related records. I think if one was diligent about declaring Rails model relationships, it could be possible to follow a key entity or two (maybe User) and pull some sample of relationships (e.g. User has many transactions, and has a profile, and roles, and so on ... all depending on your schema).

from capistrano-db-tasks.

@tomharrisonjr thank you for the detailed explanation of your inside. I will try to split all those points into a tasks when I get enough time :)

from capistrano-db-tasks.