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The UITS DBA team developed and maintains a series of scripts to refresh the non-prod Kuali databases from the most recent (nightly) production schema level export file. This process allows the Kuali non-prod environments to contain a highly relevant set of data for development, testing, training, and production trouble-shooting. The scripts are automated by environment in Control-M jobs. Refreshes are initiated by submitting a Control-M job request form to scheduling@uconn.edu, The requester simply enters the common name of the environments to refresh, in the order desired. The The automated jobs contain all of the actions necessary to take the application servers offline, perform the refresh, and then restore the application servers to an available state. The refresh process also includes scripts to restore the test version of the encryption key and java object, and to falsify and re-encrypt the contents of all sensitive data fields.
** Due to the size of the production attachments table, we do not populate the attachments in the refreshed environments. The empty table structure is created but not populated.
Sample request form
Feb 3 2015 Refresh KFS Environments Request.docx
Refreshes are performed at the start of each month (following a successful month end process). The process to requestabove form is an example of a recent request to refresh all of the non-prod environments.
Typical Issues and remediation
DR Environment
This environment is a "dual purpose" environment. It is used as an isolated test environment on an as-needed basis but additionally, DR is utilized to perform quarterly testing of the DR "fall back" process. When used for DR testing, it is maintained as a production-like environment, which includes a full copy of the production database including the document attachments.