Rake: execute vs. invoke

I recently had to write custom rake tasks for a Rails project which deals with multiple databases (one Rails database and 1+ additional databases). The way we deal with multiple databases should be covered in another post. Now i only want to show the difference between invoke and execute.

invoke

Rake::Task[:a_task].invoke

Only runs the task if needed. Which in our case translates to once.

execute

Rake::Task[:a_task].execute

Runs the task as many times as called.