Sandbox environment for customers

  • I am looking for ideas on how to solve few problems we have with our customers creating sandbox environments.

    We are running an ASP.NET web application along with a windows server and a SQL Agent job configured to run against a production SQL Server database. Customers can create a parallel setup and restore the production database to a new instance. Once this is complete everything works great and they get full functionality as planned.

    Our problems start when the sandbox application starts performing actions that should only happen in the production DB. So we may have schedule tasks that could export to the same folder location and file, send emails and or transfer data to other production sites. All of these should be functional need to be functional in the sandbox application but it should only be running newly created tasks or configuration that had been set up after the restore took place.

    I can come up with a unique solution for each of the areas where I have problems. I can write a script that could be run to disable or change all of these areas, but it is a manual step that would depend on the customer running when the environment is restored. I am hoping for a more global solution of preventing or disabling things in a sandbox environment. Even something like a restore trigger that could automatically run a script.

    How do others handle such issues?

  • If you can, script these actions, ie., put these "must change items" in a script, then parameterize and script the entire restore operation and include the t-sql restore inside of this.

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