April 28, 2006 at 3:07 am
Hello everyone,
After some thoughts on how to progress this one , any ideas , reasons etc all appreciated.
Currently have a live and test environment. 3 of the tables on the live env have high activity , changes etc.
Sizes of tables are 92 gb , 2 gb , 6.6 gb.
What are peoples thoughts about the best method to use to keep the test server up to date?
Thanks everyone.
April 28, 2006 at 8:11 am
When you say "test" what do you mean. Testing reports and other queries or do you mean strucutre changes can be made such as index changes, table column changes, or any other DDL type of change.
April 28, 2006 at 8:15 am
Sorry , when I say Test I mean we have another SQL server set up for all our application testing before committing to live.
It will be table contents and table structure changes.
April 28, 2006 at 8:55 am
Then it depends on how much of the production server you need.
If all then perform a backup an restore to the test server.
If you just need a sampling of the data consider maybe scripting the objects an applying to a clean database on the test server. Then sample from the large tables maybe 10,000 to 1 million rows using DTS to transfer them to the test server. The I would perform a backup on the Tes server database so you can roll back to that point after changes if you need to.
April 28, 2006 at 9:01 am
We have intially performed a backup and restore to populate the test server.
I suppose my question should be what do recommend as a method for keeping Test and Live in sync with each other?
Replication , or something similar now we have the main databases in place ?
Ideally would like the test to be as close to live as possible whilst not incurring any massive overhead in doing so.
April 28, 2006 at 9:12 am
You might try a tool like Log Explorer which I do believe you can get all the updates and changes form the production systems transaction log without using replication.
Replication will be hard because in your changes you might possibly break (more likely than not). And you hav to sync initially thru snapshot (that is a lot to do).
Or if yo have some way in the sytem to know which items have been modified you might try a DTS package to pull them out and push them in peridoically. But again DDL changes on table objects migh break this.
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