DW and change control: recommendations?

A fairly large (200-300 Gb) data warehouse is in consideration by my company. One area of logistics consideration is the change control methodology. Typically, I would recommend a development instance on one box, and a production instance on a different box (at least). I'm curious as to what other organizations with a large or very large data warehouse do in terms of change control and segregation between DEV and PROD, particularly prior to implementation. One thought would be to still run DEV and PROD on seperate machines, but to use a significantly smaller box for DEV and only include a subset of data for development purposes. This can cause some expected results in PROD though, due to differences in volumes of data and differences in data distribution (particularly where tuning is concerned).

If anyone has any stories they'd like to share or suggestions, I'm all ears. If you would be so kind, please email as well as posting.

Regards,

--
David C. Sisk
The Unofficial ORACLE on NT site
http://www.ipass.net/~davesisk/oont.htm Received on Thu Jul 22 1999 - 17:40:22 CDT