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.
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.
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.