Dev database/production database

Hi

I am right now trying to figure out how to solve the problem of having a development environment and a production environment. For the software parts it wasn't difficult, and now I'm focusing on the Oracle 8 database. I don't have experience concerning dev/production databases, so I hope to learn about it from other people.

Assume, that I am designing a database, doing modifications all the time, and at some day the decision is done to make a production environment out of the database. From this point the production database shouldn't be modified anymore when continueing database development or adding modifications, as it would interfere with the users connecting to the database through a web-based interface. Additionally some statements might not work anymore, if the structure of the database changes.

Therefore I was thinking of cloning the tablespace, which contains all the relevant data, so that development would be continued with one of these tablespaces, while the other one would operate in the production environment. As soon as the new dev environment is again ready to be converted to a production environment, the same would happen again, and the old production database resp. tablespaces might be removed. One problem I see is migrating the data between the old production tablespace
and the new one, which might have a slightly different structure, for example some tables might have new fields, or some fields might have been
modified.

Now I wonder whether this approach is a serious one or whether there are other approaches uses by experienced people? I would happily learn about that and would appreciate concrete solutions, which could help to achieve these goals, such as scripts for cloning tablespaces.

bye
--
Sam Jordan Received on Mon Jul 26 1999 - 05:35:56 CDT