Re: Big Test Environment Feature

Comments at appropriate places below..

On Friday 14 June 2002 04:41 pm, Bill Cunningham wrote:
> Matthew Tedder wrote:
> >Question:
> >
> > How feasible would it be to create this functionality in PostgreSQL:
> >
> >One creates a test version of a database that initially consists of
> >read-links to the production version of the same database. Any code
> > he/she then writes that reads from a table reads from the production
> > database but any code that modifies data copies that table to the test
> > database.
> >
> >The benefits of this are obviously huge for IT shops that need to
> > constantly work on data in test environments as similar as possible to
> > the production environment.
> >
> >Usually, this is a very difficult aspect of one's work and represents a
> > great deal of risk. We always try to hard to ensure that what we
> > migrate into production is going to work there the same as it did in
> > test. And we should not do testing in a production environment.
> >
> >Such a feature would give PostgreSQL a major advantage over Oracle or DB2.
> >
> >And some day when PostgreSQL is also distributable, it'll be ideal for the
> >enterprise.
> >
> >Matthew
>
> Why wouldn't you use a pg_dump of the production database? Perhaps just
> a sampling every so often?

That won't work nearly as well. Obviously we can and often do dumps. But
when testing something that has to work in a production environment, we need
to see what happens over a course of several day's time. This is needed not
only for testing of the specific code changed or added to a process, but also
a test of how it integrations with a larger and more complex information flow
system.

>
> This sounds like a lot of unnecessary work for the engine. How about a
> seperate program which has
> notify links to the source database and places updated data in the test db?

Big unnecessary dumps and recreation of the data structures also
unecissarilly use I/O resources. The idea is to minimize that and
easily/seemlessly create testing environments.

Often, many programmer/analysis are working on different parts of the
information system simultaneously each and every day.

Matthew

>
> - Bill
>
>
>
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