Using cucumber with staging database without truncation and transactions

We have a Ruby on Rails 2.3.8 project, where data are almost exclusiv开发者_开发百科ely read only. We would like to write acceptance tests which use staging database (copy of the production database)

So we do not want to use transactions or truncation of the database tables before or after features and scenarios.

Is it possible?

My solution was to switch DatabaseCleaner to transaction cleaning strategy in features/support/env.rb

if defined?(ActiveRecord::Base)
  begin
    require 'database_cleaner'
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
  rescue LoadError => ignore_if_database_cleaner_not_present
  end
end

And monkey patch DatabaseCleaner by adding features/support/database_cleaner_patch.rb with

module DatabaseCleaner::ActiveRecord
  #for now we will disable transactions 
  class Transaction

    def start
    end

    def clean
    end
  end
end

We have 3 databases in our project, with cross-database queries so we cannot use transactions, otherwise I would not monkey patch DatabaseCleaner