Greetings,
* Julie Nishimura (juliezain@hotmail.com) wrote:
> Hello everybody, I am new to postgresql environment, but trying to get up to speed.
> Can you please share your experience on how you can automate refreshment of dev environment on regular basis
(desirablyweekly), taking for consideration some of prod dbs can be very large (like 20+ TB
>
> Any suggestions?
The approach that I like to recommend is to have your backup/restore
solution be involved in this refreshing process, so that you're also
testing that your backup/restore process works correctly. For dealing
with larger databases, using a backup tool which has parallel backup,
parallel restore, and is able to restore just the files which are
different from the backup can make the restore take much less time (this
is what the 'delta-restore' option in pgbackrest does, and it was
specifically written to support exactly this kind of prod->dev periodic
refresh, though other tools may also support that these days).
As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, using snapshots can also be a
good approach though you have to be sure that the snapshot is completely
atomic across all filesystems that PostgreSQL is using, or you have to
deal with running pg_start/stop_backup and putting a backup_label into
place for the restored snapshot and a recovery.conf to provide a way for
PG to get at any WAL which was generated while the snapshot (or
snapshots) was being taken.
Thanks!
Stephen