All shops have more than one database, unless all of the development and testing are done off-site. Normally you will have perhaps three or four "instances" of your database. You may have a simple, generic database that is a baseline for your system. This may be the original database product you purchased or created, and usually this copy is not modified. Then you will have an instance for your technical staff to work with; in fact you will probably have several such instances. Third, your users will have their own copy for acceptance testing, and finally, you will have a production instance. Now remember that you will also be responsible for maintaining all upgrades from all your vendors Oracle included. Sometimes you will need additional database instances to test these upgrades. So it is not uncommon for a shop to have more than four instances of a database at any one time. As DBA you will be the one who has to keep track of themwhat state they're in, who has which rights to each one, and so forth. Make sure you keep good notes. Fortunately, creating an instance is straightforward. We'll use import/export as an example.
Warning There is something called a refresh of a test instance. A refresh is useful when the test data is so out-of-date that it is no longer relevant. You can import just certain files, but most of the time refresh is an all-or-nothing proposition. Just remember to warn your customers that when you run the IMPORT utility just to bring the test database current, they will lose any data that they have entered because it will be overlaid with the database that you are importing. So if someone has favorite test cases out there, they will lose them and have to start over. |