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 solution for replicating data

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helpimdying
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2013-06-24 : 08:58:37
Hello everyone.

I'm new to database administration and i've been charged with finding a solution for the development team. Here at the company i work in, we have of course separared environments for production and software development.

Sometimes the development team needs to have recent data on the development databases so they can test new features, and lately we have been copying the lastest full DB backup we have to their servers and restoring the database. This is often a time consuming task because they ask me to restore the database many times a day because of corrupted data due to software bugs, etc, and sometimes the database has a size of 200 GB and there isant suficient storage capacity on their servers, so i have to look for DBs that are not being used anymore, shrink data files and stuff.

I'm trying to find a way to ensure recent data is replicated to their server on a on-demand basis, without having to backup, copy the file over the network, and restore everytime they screw up the database. Besides, i can't have the WHOLE databases on their servers because they wouldn't have enough storage capacity, and they only need the more recent rows of each table.

I've thought about 2 ways to solve this problem so far:

Snapshot replication: Could work, but does it copy the entire database to the subscriber, or only the updated rows of each transaction, just like database snapshot? Does it even allow for data changes, or is it a read only copy of the DB?

Saving backup copies in a network share and leaving it up to the DEV OPS: It could work if their servers had enough storage capacity to restore a 700GB database when needed.

Any ideas on this matter are appreciated.

Bustaz Kool
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

1834 Posts

Posted - 2013-06-26 : 17:41:22
Have you considered using a filter on the replicated data? This does imply that there is a column that could be used for this purpose but your comment that "they only need the more recent rows of each table" leaves me hopeful. If you had that, a snapshot could be fired off on demand and only a subset of the production data would be used.

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helpimdying
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2013-06-27 : 08:46:46
Thank you for your reply, Bustaz Kool.

As I said im new to DBA so i never really used replication, so i didn't know there was an option to filter out the replicated data. Im gonna try that out some time and see if it'll work. Thanks.
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