automated refresh of dev from prod

My method is complex and not so good for newbies, but it is incredibly fast and should scale to almost any size database. Mine are not nearly as large though.

I use two methods... the normal backup/restore for longer lived development environments, and for shorter lived environments I use postgres native mirroring from a secondary prod server to all my dev environments, then use LVM snapshots to take a snapshot of the postgres mount. Mount the snapshot and startup a second postgres instance in it and you have a mirror of production ready for use. That only lasts for a finite amount of time though (until you fill the space dedicated to the snapshot) before it becomes unusable,
that's the downside... it can't be long lived (hours, 1-2 days maybe). The upside is that the refresh from production in my environment for a 400G database is 3 seconds. It is a trade-off and not fit for every use, that's why we also use the traditional backup/restore in some cases.

Scot Kreienkamp |Senior Systems Engineer | La-Z-Boy Corporate
One La-Z-Boy Drive| Monroe, Michigan 48162 | Office: 734-384-6403 | | Mobile: 7349151444 | Email: Scot.Kreienkamp@la-z-boy.com
From: Julie Nishimura [mailto:juliezain@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2019 4:16 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: automated refresh of dev from prod

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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 (desirably weekly), taking for consideration some of prod dbs can be very large (like 20+ TB

Any suggestions?

Thank you!

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On 2/27/19 3:15 PM, Julie Nishimura 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 (desirably weekly), taking for
consideration some of prod dbs can be very large (like 20+ TB

Any suggestions?

Weekly refreshes of 20TB from prod to dev seems a bit excessive.

--
Angular momentum makes the world go 'round.

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 (desirably weekly), 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

On Feb 28, 2019, at 8:04 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:

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 (desirably weekly), 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.

Very much yes to everything Stephen says. Regularly refreshing nonprod via your normal backup/restore process is an efficient way to test your backups, and snapshots are a great way to do backups when your data volume is greater than your churn between backups. (And at 20+ TB, I hope that's the case for you.)