Porting test rows to a Development instance...

Dear Gurus:

        We have an ongoing issue in our shop that is causing everyone headaches. The issue involves porting an ample amount of test data from, say our Production instance down to our Development instance to adequately test our customizations. We are running the Smart Client version (10.7SC, Prod. 16.1) of Oracle Financials and the table relationships involved can get very involved such that, merely copying rows from several tables down to Development can become a nightmare. In some cases, the customizations we are developing require that only several rows be populated - we can do this by manually entering test data via the Oracle Forms. However, most of our customizations are very complex and require large amounts of data to be brought over. Can the Group give me any products out on the market to accomplish this? How do you normally handle these issues at your shop???

        Our DBAs indicate that it is not their responsibility to become involved with this "data transfer/population" process and we do not have the functional analysts to manually enter the data needed most of the time. The result of all of this is that we're having developers enter test data into our development instance - developers that sometimes do not have the functional background to create adequate test scenarios manually. As I understand it, this can become quite a controversial issue in some shops.

								John Mule'			
								Oracle Development Team
								Tulane University
								(504) 862-8000 ext. 2574