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Ask HN: Does your company give devs DB dumps to use for local development?

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Re: Ask HN: Does your company give devs DB dumps to use for local development?

#11
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For several customer projects I periodically create a new dev database from a production snapshot on AWS RDS. Then I run an anonymizer script over it to change names and email addresses and phone numbers and so on, so the dev data looks real but doesn’t refer to real people. For one big database the anonymizer script can also cull data, so I can set maximum 1,000 customer records (chosen at random) and remove all rel…

May need to test application that speed or latency etc. with 100k or more than so how do you set records that exception?

That kind of testing would not happen on a developer laptop. I normally have a staging environment that duplicates production, including the database. The number of rows in a relational database shouldn’t affect app speed or latency at 10k vs 100k rows. I would expect the number of rows to affect performance logarithmically, if at all.

Re: Ask HN: Does your company give devs DB dumps to use for local development?

#12
We do have the ability to do sql db dumps but usually dont as that would be pretty time consuming i assume, if i am about to do something that could potentially screw up dev environment db, i would just tell my manager and lead dev of the sprint before hand and check which dba is available beforehand to undue my changes if things start breaking.

Mongo dumps are much easier to do so i do dump mongo onto local.

Re: Ask HN: Does your company give devs DB dumps to use for local development?

#13
In our case (Vertica + streaming big data) we don't need the full data. Most of the time we only need a few weeks of data or even maybe a couple of days, so the amount is minimum and we write scripts to import from PROD to DEV.

We don't have DEV in local laptops though. All data is still contained in a local data center.

Re: Ask HN: Does your company give devs DB dumps to use for local development?

#14
I worked at a company that had all our clients' salesforce, emails and internal communications in our production database. It was the most security minded company I ever worked for in 25 years. They didn't allow windows. Only macs on their network.

Anyway, our staging and development database had crap data. I asked if we could get production data in staging and they said no.

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