RE: Developers wanting individual Unit Test (no data) databases - suggestions?

Tangential question: You wrote Unit Test Database, and probably that is what you mean, but depending on first DBMS system some folks mean “schema” when they mean database. IF that is the case here, and especially if schemas on which your applications run allow flexible schema naming, you *might* be able to achieve your goal simply by dropping and creating test schemas, typically with a developer id as part of each test schema.  

(That is sort of the old school way to do it from before the wonderful products listed below existed. One useful side effect is it forces software vendors to have flexible schema names driven by configuration instead of, holy cow, being hardwired.)  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2017 9:37 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Developers wanting individual Unit Test (no data) databases - suggestions?  

On 08/11/2017 01:25 PM, Chris Taylor wrote:

We've got a relatively large development group who want to have many Unit Test databases (without data) that they can spin up on demand and destroy when done.  

I'm curious what products are available that could facilitate something like this?  

I was thinking something like this:  

Unit Test (UT Master) - code replicated from production nightly (never used for testing)  

How could I facilitate users creating a copy on demand of UTMaster using something like:  

VMWare or

Delphix or

Docker or

something  

I'm basically looking to see what options are to accomplish something like this.  

I was thinking if we stood up UT Master on a VM, we could snap the VM into another copy for a specific developer on demand.  

Chris

I would add Commvault to the above list. Commvault is a comprehensive backup suite which can create on demand databases using either storage snapshots or our own block level backup technology. However, if you don't want to procreate TB sized databases on demand, there is a very nice utility called DataBee which follows the foreign keys and creates a consistent database subset. The utility is from a UK company called Net 2000. Here is more info: http://www.net2000ltd.com/DataBee.html

Commvault, Delphix, Actifio and Veeam will produce a full copy of a database, literally in minutes. However, that will still will be a full copy of your database, which you cannot squeeze to a 10GB format and deliver to your developers. You can also try with Amazon S3 which also supports snapshots and cloning. Delivery is in, that case, very simple. Oracle cloud can do that, too.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
Tel: (347) 321-1217


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