How do you handle Dev DB vs Production DB?

[programmervb netc]

When I first started working at my job we maintained local DBs for development on our own machines...so there was alot of upkeep backing up production data restore etc. Then we had a spare server laying around so we started to use it as the devDB. Now the server is being used for other purposes so we are back to square one which takes alot of time. Does anyone have any suggestions of a better way to do this? FYI we are using mySQL.

Humble Programmer

[PIEBALDconsult]

Development servers. Every time.

programmervb.netc++ wrote:

backing up production data restore

Never did that; always generated test data -- it's repeatable.

[programmervb netc]

I would think it would take more time to generate the amount of test data we need than it would to do backup restore... Are there tools for this? Also one reason the data being REAL data matters is because we are converting all apps from Access to mySQL and VB6 to VB.NET so we are running our reports against old and new data to make sure we did not screw up a conversion or the new/better ways we are writing the SQL.

Humble Programmer

[Mycroft Holmes]

3 Servers is a requirement, dev, uat and production. If/when we have a major deployment and can sync all the servers from production we do this. It does not happen very often as the development almost never stops so all the servers have different versions. But then we have something like 14 apps under production. We also have another server for bug tracing, take a snapshot of the production server and chase down the problem. We also use SQL compare and data compare to do deployment, greatest time save ever for deployment.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH