Help - "Production" and "Test" databases

I am looking for some help in setting up an Oracle system. We are running Oracle 7 on DOS/Windows, under Novell Netware 3.12. Our applications are to be developed in Oracle Forms, Report Writer, and SQL Plus.

For our working environment, I need to set up the database and applications so that we have two or three "copies" of the database, one for testing, one for training, and one for production.

The application code should be the same for all three environments, and the user should be able to specify at logon (connect) time which region he or she wants access to.

As I understand things, under Novell I can only have a single database instance (and I'd probably only want one anyway). I therefore need to set this up within a single database.

I have had a number of ideas on how I could do this, using different user names for the various regions, or using views or synonyms in some way, but all my ideas seem too complex. I heard a suggestion that you can use tablespaces to do this (one tablespace for each of test, training and production) but I don't see how, and I cannot get back to the source of the suggestion.

Can anybody help me? I am new to Oracle, and therefore don't have the experience of what seems to me to be a "standard" problem for DBAs, but we have to have systems up and running ASAP, so any advice would be appreciated.

(Come to that, any advice for a new oracle DBA, which would help me to avoid time-consuming pitfalls, would be much appreciated!)

Thanks in advance,

Paul Moore.

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Paul Moore (pmoore_at_cix.compulink.co.uk)   |


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