Transaction Log Shipping restore on demand - good idea for UAT testing?

  • Folks,
    In our production environment we have a operations database and a copy of the database for reporting purposes.  The workflow is to back up the operational database nightly (spread across 16 files), copy the files to the reporting server and restore to the reporting database.  This process takes about 2 hours.

    We are doing a large upgrade and I need to prove that the application can connect to a UAT copy of the reporting database and run all the reports (schemas have changed) We are proposing to set up the operational and reporting database on the same server.  One of the things I need to test is that the reports don't reflect recent transactions (because that would prove it is connecting to the wrong database!); however I also don't want a 2 hour delay to restore the reporting database when we do need to prove that the transactions do now appear.

     As the operational database for UAT will only have a handful of transactions relative to the production copy I am proposing that we use Transaction Log Shipping to hive off the updated records in UAT operations.
    Is is safe to keep these transaction logs on a drive until we need to restore them to the UAT reporting database and to then load these on-demand

    Is this the best strategy or would a differential backup and restore make more sense?
    The database is 275GB

    Aaron

  • aaron.reese - Friday, July 21, 2017 3:21 AM

    Is is safe to keep these transaction logs on a drive until we need to restore them to the UAT reporting database and to then load these on-demand

    Shouldnt be an issue, the backups only sit on disk anyway

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 1 (of 1 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply