Production & Development Environment

Hello,

Just setting up an Oracle environment and I'm wondering how people go about having their development environment mirror their production environment. We are moving from an Xbase environment where we simply copy our database files and indexes from production to development each night.

I was thinking of doing the same type of thing with Oracle. That is, shutting it down and copying over all the data files, control files, log files, etc. I've done some preliminary work and it seems like it will work just fine. One problem is that after each copy, developers will have to recreate any temporary objects they may have created.

Is this the way it's done? Is there a better way? I would love to hear how some of you out there are handling this. Thanks so much!

Neil