Production / Dev Design

  • There doesn't seem to be a good place to ask this in the 2008 section... so I am placing it here..

    If you have a production system that has a number of SQL Servers, each holding an instance, and each instance holding a number of databases.

    Applications use data from outside of their database, often quite a few.

    So how do you set-up and maintain a development enviroment? Everytime a programmer starts a project they currently have to check with everyone else and update a number of databases from production... this seems like a lot of work, and there should be a better way to keep the two in sync. I have thought about installing one Dev instance per developer.. and have them release work into a QA system... but this also seems like a lot of overkill, and overhead, for our non-production server.

  • Are all these production database alike? ... like implementations of the same for different customers?

    I would consider a single development instance where each developer is the master and commander of it own schema. Initial integration test can be done in the "operational" schema of this development server then, final testing on a test/qa database.

    I would script the whole promotion process when moving from developement to test then use the same script to promote changes a.k.a. ddl and dml from Test/QA to Production.

    Hope this helps.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • PaulB-TheOneAndOnly (6/11/2013)


    Are all these production database alike? ... like implementations of the same for different customers?

    Hope this helps.

    Thanks, no we have a number of applications that we support, and each has its own database. However these applications often pull data from each other.

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