Question

I want a way to comprehensively view:

1. what's going on in my database
2. what the schema looks like

Is there a good tool that lets you do that?

Answer 1

There’s a gem Active Admin that lets you do that: http://activeadmin.info/documentation.html

And of course you can use any other Administration tool that lets you connect to your database, for instance Squirrel http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/ which connects to various sql databases, sqlite among them.

For development and testing, I would say the preferred way of knowing your data is generating it automatically using tools like FactoryGirl or Faker and look into schema.rb for the schema.