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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Software vendor using additional schemas for testing!
Wow,
That is one screwy software vendor. Three distinct database environments is the minimum for any sort of semi industry standard configuration. =20
One tack I would take is that Oracle will be desupporting 8.1.7 at the end of the year, so you'll probably be doing a database upgrade in the near future. You need to have different environments to be able to test an upgrade and you need to test an upgrade thoroughly before rolling it into production.
Having dev & test on the same database makes tuning significantly more difficult, since many parameters need to be set at a database level, so you have no way to test them out before applying them to production.
Having dev & test on the same machine also has performance implications-- if you're testing in QA, you're putting load on the system that may interfere with production-- a very bad thing.
OK guys, need some help and ammunition here, so a bit of background first. I'm in my 3rd week in a new job where they are have a 3rd party financials app sitting on 8.1.7 on win2k. Software vendor is coming in today to make some changes.
They've never had any in-house DBA skills and have relied solely on 3rd parties. No Oracle support contract (I'm working on getting this changed!). No DBA contract with 3rd party, only chargeable, ad-hoc work.
So, they've talked about getting the data in the test/dev databases
refreshed, far as I can see they only have one database. Turns out they
have one database with three separate schemas. To refresh data, 3rd
party has done export/import between the schemas. I've tried explaining
that this is not ideal and that=20
really they need a separate test system, but they don't understand.
Absolutely no database knowledge in here, and it would seem that even
the software vendor is lacking in this department. (Just to demonstrate,
3 redo log groups, 1 member per group size 1M, all sat in same location,
2 copies of controlfile, in same location - get the drift??)
The work the software vendor is coming in to do is create 6 new schemas
as a way of providing 6 different=20
'staging areas' where copies of the live data can be kept at different
points in time to help through year end. Once year end is completed they
think they can use these 'staging areas' for testing enhancements.
I can't look on Metalink, as no CSI number. I'm about to look at OTN and go RTFM's, which I only got today.
What I would like, and quickly is some strong arguments as to why it should not be done this way and alternatives to suggest. I've already mentioned creating a dedicated test database. I've so far managed to hold off on the software vendor beginning work, but I now need to justify this to my manager and to the software vendor.=20
TIA Lisa.
-- Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.htmlReceived on Thu May 13 2004 - 03:46:19 CDT
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