I've seen this post a few times, but haven't really found the answer to this specific question. I'd like to run a rails application that based on the detected request.host (imagine I have two subdomains points to the same rails app and server ip address: myapp1.domain.com and myapp2.domain.com). I'm trying to have myapp1 use the default "production" database, and myapp2 requests always use the alternative remote database. Here is an example of what I tried to do in Application controller that did not work: class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base helper :all before_filter :use_alternate_db private def use_alternate_db if request.host == 'myapp1.domain.com' regular_db elsif request.host == 'myapp2.domain.com' alternate_db end end def regular_db ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :production end def alternate_db ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection( :adapter => 'mysql', :host => '...', :username => '...', :password => '...', :database => 'alternatedb' ) end end The problem is when it switches databases using this method, all connections (including valid sessions across the different subdomains get interrupted...). All examples online have people controlling database connectivity at the model level, but this would involve adding code all over my application. Is there some way to globally switch database connections on a per-request basis in the manner I'm suggesting above WITHOUT having to inject code all over my application? The added complexity here is I'm using Heroku as a hosting provider, so I have no control at the apache / rails application server level. I have looked at solutions like dbcharmer and magicmodels, but none seem to show examples of doing it in the manner that I'm trying to. Thanks for any help!