Unfortunately PHP's PDO constructor doesn't take a database connection url (in a format that Heroku makes available as a config var) as an argument. It has its own, rather odd syntax. However, it's easy enough to extract url parts with the `parse_url`...

I love the Rails reload! function when in the console. I need it in Irb. To get it back this is what I did. If you don't already have an .irbrc file in your home directory, just create it. vim ~/.irbrc or textmate if you prefer mate ~/.irbrc Add this...