I have recently started working on a legacy application that has most of its business logic in stored procedures spread over two or three SQL Server databases. Currently all code is also edited in the live environment.
As I am new to the codebase, I don’t really want to make any changes in the live environment and therefore I’m trying to set up a development environment. We’re using Visual Studio to script out all the database objects and are tracking those in Subversion.
With that I can then set up a dev SQL Server instance to work in but one problem is that the code is full of hard coded references to server and database names, for example many of the stored procs look something like the following:
CREATE PROCEDURE server1.db1.dbo.proc1 AS
INSERT INTO db1.dbo.table1
EXEC server2.db2.dbo.proc2
END
How can I change all these references in a safe manner? So far I have thought of two options:
1) Have a script that runs a global search and replace of the server names on my subversion working copy and then run that modified code against my test databases.
2) Set up a dns alias on my local box by editing my \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file that redirects server1 and server2 to development instances of the databases. On the production servers these would then point at the production databases.
Which of these is a better setup in your opinion? Do you see any risks with either that I have neglected and which should be taken into account?
If all references are to linked server “Server2” etc then you can specify a different underlying SQL Server on your dev box for that linked server
You can do one of: