Bill Willyerd (bw*******@dshs.wa.gov) writes:
I have been looking for some documentation that would support or reject
my opinion on Production -vs- Development naming conventions. I
believe that each environment should be housed on separate servers with
identical names, access, users, stored procs....... If you either
agree or disagree with this methodology, I would appreciate your input.
If we were do that in our shop, we would have to have a load of servers!
More generally, it depends on what your situation is. The above could
be a good idea for in-house applications, where there is exactly one
production server. (We develop a product, and we have one development
environment and one test environment for each customer and for each
version in production, test and development. That's a lot of databases.)
I would say that the key point is that you have separate servers.
Testing on a second database on the production machine can lead
unpleasant incidents, because test reveals a query with a poor query
plan.
Wether the database should have the same name? Of course, it helps,
but what if you need more than one testing environment? One of our
customers at one point had 3-4 test databases, all for our application.
I can reveal that they did not have four test servers. Thus, it is a
good idea to make it easy to switch database in the application.
As for the same stored procedures etc, this is best achieved by having
a version-control system as the definition of your system.
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP,
es****@sommarskog.se
Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp 
