Re: PROD without TEST

D> This is more of a survey than a question, but how many of you DBAs out
D> there who are administering production databases that don't have a test
D> database to go with it?
D> We are a new but rapidly changing shop and we have a bunch of small
D> to medium size databases that are running without a test database. This 
D> makes DBA tasks like upgrade more difficult. I am having a hard time trying 
D> to get the management to allocate the resources for this. I wonder how other 
D> DBAs are doing to deal with situations like this.

I had to run like that for some numbers of years in the early 90's. If any development or upgrades were going on we were crisis management mode. Good thing there were only three of us in the shop and were good friends or there would have been casualties. But resources were much more expensive back then.

Now I'm in a shop where every production database has both a warm standby database and a test database. Often there is another reporting database. With the price of disk resources these days, it's worth it not to have to tiptoe around the production database and also allows users to play a lot of "what if" games without affecting production data. Received on Thu Jun 22 2000 - 15:49:22 CDT