Re: refreshing from production

Diana Bonham <diana_at_fnal.gov> wrote in message news:<3BBCD987.6000704_at_fnal.gov>...
> i asked a few months back, but I guess I stumped everyone. My question
> then was "how to refresh a database with a SAMPLING of production data"
> Our production database is just getting too big to easily do it with
> export/import, and takes up more disk space than we care to use. Does
> anyone know of a 3rd party product to take a sampling of a database,
> perhaps giving it a "master table" to take the sample from, and which
> follows all the foreign key constraints to child tables all the way down
> to take the corresponding rows from them? Sounds like a tall order....
> Anyone ever written a program to do this?
>
> Diana

This will seem to be very application specific. More and more applications don't even use referential integrity within the database; the do that in the application code, giving you a set of tables that seem to have no relations at all. I did this once a few years back for a special application and I can tell you, it's a lot of work and no fun at all. Ofcourse it's a bit easier when you have access to the data model but still it's a lot of work.

Ronald.