Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database

re: Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database

GrumpyOldDBA — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:05:02 GMT

In reality I don't think there is a perfect solution. I've too often had issues where development is done with desktop o/s and tiny databases - something which as you rightly say bears no resemblence to the production environment.

What I believe is that stress/performance testing should occur seperate to the actual development. The clone idea is ok but it won't really contain a subset of data or allow large data manipulations .. for example a number of times I have had to work "upgrades" which have been tested ( by the thrid party ) on their test database. "It'll take no more than an hour" - we run it and 3 days later it's still only 30% through. The conversation goes something like this " So what type of server did you use?" - " My laptop " - " How many rows in your xxx table? " - " 50,000" - "oh - we have 450 million rows " and yes this is the abridged conversation I had with the company whose previous "fix" to a business critical system had introduced a bug which could be fixed with a simple update - their words not mine.

You're right, the question never goes away.

re: Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database

KKline — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:22:39 GMT

Right you are, Grumpy. It's definitely NOT the same thing and can't be used for stress/performance testing. (At least not with the expectation that you'll get realistic results). But, at least you'll now get realistic execution plans for your SQL - and that's a big step forward.

re: Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database

Ben Thul — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:23:10 GMT

My take on this is: the easier you can make doing this, the more likely it is to be done. So, here you go: http://www.spartansql.com/2012/03/scripting-out-statistics.html.