If you could give every developer a copy of the database, would you?

The simple truth is that databases can’t be given to every developer like source code.

Databases can be large, complex, and extremely difficult to copy. It is rare to see developers or even development groups that have a copy of the full production database to use for their tasks.

On the other hand, developers almost always have access to a full copy of the application code stack. Source control methods like git make it easy to clone, fork, and track code from the component level to the entire codebase.

For databases, the typical strategies are:

1. Share a full copy of the source database across a group
2. Provide small subsets of data from the source database to developers
3. Allocate schema only ‘databases’ per developer

Each of these strategies presents their own problems.

Sharing a database across a group of developers means that any change one developer makes can impact the other developers. There is no automated way to protect a group of developers from the changes of a single developer. To protect development problems that can be caused by new changes, the changes have to be reviewed. Reviews can take up to a couple of weeks, meaning the coder who wants to implement these changes has to wait. The first in a long line of delays as a result of inadequate database resources.

If developers are given subsets of the database (partial copies, only some data) or empty skeleton schemas, it will easily lead to code that has not been tested on the full range of data that is present in production. This of course opens the door to untested bugs born from outliers in the data and queries that are not optimized on the full set of data. Finding these bugs late in the development cycle is more costly by far than finding them immediately with the developer writing the code.

With Delphix you can........

Version data like code

How does it work?

According to one of our customers...

"Delphix maintains a continuous streaming backup of our production databases and allows us to create as many full copies as we want.  Copies can be masked or unmasked and are created in minutes, using minimal storage.   Delphix enables us to deliver projects faster whilst saving us time and money.”