title: Preparing seed data as JSON or for Rails helpers
body: <p>I have to prepare a rather large amount of seed data for a Rails application. Based on my limited experience, I know of two ways to do it but want to know which offers the most flexibility.</p>
  
  <p>One, I could do it with Rails and just prepare the seed data the way it's used in the seeds.rb file</p>
  
  <pre><code>User.create!( name: "John" ) 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Or, I could create a json document of the data. For example, I know that Mongodb lets you import json documents directly into the database. I'm not sure about other databases...</p>
  
  <p>It occurred to me that a json document might be the most flexible, because I suppose you could also use a regular expression script to turn the json into something like this  <code>User.create!( name: "John" )</code> </p>
  
  <p>However, I'm wondering if there's any other issues I should consider...</p>