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Rails Migrations with Slony?

The new app I’m developing is written in Ruby on Rails and runs on PostgreSQL. We’re replicating our production database using Slony-I, but we’ve run into a bit of a snag: database schema updates must be run as plain SQL through a Slony script in order to ensure proper replication of the schema changes within a transaction, but Rails migrations run as Ruby code updating the database via the Rails database adapter.

So how do others handle Rails migrations with their Slony-I replication setups? How do you update the Slony-I configuration file for the changes? How do you synchronize changes to the master schema out to the slaves? Do you shut down your apps, shut down Slony-I, make the schema changes to both the master and the slaves, and then restart Slony-I and your apps?

For that matter, people running Slony for their Bricolage databases must have the same issue, because the Bricolage upgrade scripts are just Perl using the DBI, not SQL files. Can anyone shed a little light on this for me?

Oh, and one last question: Why is this such a PITA? Can’t we have decent replication that replicates everything, including schema changes? Please?

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