I seem to recall at a conference one time someone presented a script that essentially made the dreaded LIVE to TEST copy an SQL Server Agent Job that you could schedule whenever you liked (like in the middle of the night when no one else would be using the system) and not be stuck up at the office for two hours. Perhaps it was one of those Mini-Magic solutions?
Does anyone recall that, and if so, can they direct me to such precious materials? Our network administrator used to perform LIVE-to-TEST copies and she recently passed away suddenly. With rollovers coming shortly, I'd love to be able to get this solution up and running in time.
Thank you in advance, as always, Tessiturians.
I would be interested in seeing this also! Thanks!
Wow, sorry to hear about your admin. Mini magics should be available for download on the conference site.
Literally just yesterday I finished rewriting our live-to-test copy into a single PowerShell script. It's not super-portable yet, but it's on its way and could be modified to suit a different environment without too much difficulty.
If you can't find an existing ready-made one, I'm happy to share my work on Bitbucket as a starting point -- maybe we could build on it collaboratively.
Wow, that would be amazing to make it a scheduled job- I'd be very interested in that.
And I'm very sorry to hear about your admin. Let us know if there's any way we can help out.
We're a RAMP client, and I'm pretty sure they have some or all of it wrapped into a SQL Server Agent job.
They also generally have a small script the run after the database copy to update various things like API urls, title bar text, etc. to be appropriate for the Test environment. We, however, have tons of stuff like that to manage, so I built a "post-copy" test update utility that runs off of some custom system tables to change table values and run other utilities (like CC purge and web session cleanup). My week is currently insane, but if you're interested I could try and get that up to bitbucket at some point.
That sounds glorious. I've only had to do it a few times so far, but I already dislike it. I'd saved the post copy cleanup stuff as sql queries and was going to build them as a job that I could schedule. Having the rest of the copy process available like that would be extremely helpful.
Thank you, Kathleen. And thank you everyone that has expressed sympathies. Our beloved Maria was one of those wizards that quietly handled so much in our little 2 person IT shop here and we're only just now figuring out the scope of things that need to be taken over by myself and a new temporary hire. Our responsibilities were divided in strange ways; I am the DBA and handle Tessitura stuff generally, but because she was the Network Administrator, she would handle server-related things, so she would be the one to do the LIVE-to-TEST copies and Tessitura version upgrades, etc.
Anyway, to Gawain and Nick, anything you could offer would be most helpful since I don't relish the idea of waiting for our Customer Care/Telemarketing teams to go home around 8:00 p.m. before I can start the LIVE-to-TEST and going home afterward at 10:30 p.m. or so during rollover time.
Thanks again, Tessiturians.