Re: Creating a "shadow" environment

Nils, A better way maybe to try using CDR to copy the data around. This way it can be done continuously instead of in one large batch. Also only the changes will be replicated not the whole DB. Regards David Ashby ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Creating a "shadow" environment Author: "Nils van der Laan" <nilsl@simac.nl> at WCA-INET Date: 10/4/98 1:49 PM In our company we are going to use BaanIV (running on Informix) as an enterprise wide application. In our current setup (with Triton running on a B-ISAM database) we are able to provide the users with a"socalled "shadow" environment. This environment consists of a copy of all operational data. The environment is used for testing-purposes and for producing "end-of-month", "end-of-quarter" and "end-of-year" reports by the financial department. With the new application (BaanIV) we would also like to have the possibility of the "shadow environment". The most "simple" way to create this, is by using a BaanIV-session called "Create Sequential Dump of Table" to create a file that holds all data of the "operational" companies. Next we could import this data (under another company-number) with "Create Table from Sequential Dump". With some alterations in the data (BaanIV provides some special session for this) the shadow-environment would be available. This procedure presents us with a problem: the night is to short to accomplish this. The BaanIV-session for creating the dumps and importing them are not very fast. The amount of data will (initialy) be about 15 Gigabytes. This will grow fast! During a personel brainstorm session, I came up with the idea to creat the environment by using Informix. Here's my idea: Put all companies that need to be duplicated in a seperate dataspace. Bring informix down and copy this entire dataspace. after this bring Informix up again (with the right definitions for the databases, for example baandb for the orginal data and baandbshadow for the copy). By installing a second BaanIV-environment on the server, that uses the shadow-data instead of the "operational" data, the copy could be available. Users could have a second login-name (say USERX for the normal environment and SUSERX for the shadow environment) that would automaticaly redirect them to the corect environment. Could this work? If so: are there problems to be expected? If not: what would? Thanks, Nils van der Laan Nils.Laan@simac.nl