Document the preferred design approach and procedures to make updates to the database data used by project developers

[MikeTheCanuck]

As a Hack Oregon project developer, I want to download the current version of the project's developer data so that I can perform project development tasks without Internet access.

We will need a procedure description for the data replication and update sequence that each project will enable on behalf of project developers. This approach will make it possible for each project's developers to work from a local copy of the project's data, so that

• they don't have to pay the penalty of lag time connecting over the internet to an EC2-hosted Postgres image
• database credentials aren't being published in a way that non-project participants could trivially discover the staging database's credentials and abuse them
• access to the SQL port of the project's staging database doesn't have to be opened up to the entire Internet
• bandwidth costs for the AWS-hosted databases are kept down

Acceptance criteria

• Project developers should be able to develop their code changes against a developer copy of the data that does not require them to have a solid connection to the Internet
• Project developers that wish to work with a local copy of the data should be able to obtain the current version of the project data from a centralized, well-known, easily-discoverable source [i.e. the location of the download that contains the data shall be automatically documented in a central location]
• Project developers that wish to work with a local copy of the data should be able to download the current version of the project data in a reasonably short amount of time [e.g. 30 seconds on a broadband connection]

Constraints

At least two projects (Budget is one) have database data that measures in the 100's of MB or more. For these projects, we should investigate ways to generate a "developer subset" of that data that still fulfils test criteria without requiring them to have monstrous guest images/containers to overtax their development computer's RAM.