There is a massive database (GB) that I am working with now and all of the previous development has been done on a slicehost slice. I am trying to get ready for more developers to come in and work so I need each person to be able to setup his own machine for development, which means potentially copying this database. Selecting only the first X rows in each table to cut size could be problematic for data consistency. Is there any way around this, or is a 1 hour download for each developer going to be necessary? And beyond that, what if I need to copy the production DB down for dev purposes in the future?
Sincerely,
Tyler
Why not have a dev server that each dev connects to?
Yes all devs develop against the same database. No developement is ever done excpt through scripts that are checked into Subversion. If a couple of people making changes run into each other, all the better that they find out as soon as possible that they are doing things which might conflict.
We also periodically load a prod backup to dev and rerun any scripts for things which have not yet been loaded to prod to keep out data up-to-date. Developing against the full data set is critical once you have a medium sized database because the coding techniques which appear to be fine to a dev on a box by himself with a smaller dataset, will often fail misreably against prod sized data and when there are multiple users.