Ask HN: How do you create a sample DB from your LIVE DB?

6 pointsgumuz3 comments

Our LIVE database is too large to be running on our dev machines, but we do need good data sample to test & develop on.

Does anyone know of a good solution to this problem?

We have always solved this by having a large dev database machine, periodically synced it from live, and connected to it from the dev machines. Hardware is extremely cheap, compared to dev time. (in the cases I've seen, it was infeasible to select a representative sample - we may need any of the database rows; approximating the live database from just a sample was not an option. I understand that your case would be okay with not having specific data on-hand, as long as the sample is representative of the full set?)

One of my old companies also did this. It worked ok most of the time but you just need to be that little bit more careful that your changes don't affect other's since it's a shared database.

For oracle db, we sometimes take partial db dump from prod. into dev/test environment. But this is at my work where we have specialized DBAs.

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