Development Environment

The development environment is where the developer will actually write the code for the application. The requirement gathered from the client is analyzed and documented here. Once the analysis is done, a developer or a team of developers will start working on creating an application here.

Developers will be connected to some local database or a dummy database so that they can write code without messing up the real data.

A lot of preliminary testing will happen in this environment. You don’t want to release your code before you make sure it works locally at least. So as a database administrator you may need to run numerous scripts in the local database.

Generally, this environment is local to the developer, however, if multiple developers work for the same application, we will have a centralized development environment.

The database you create for the developer is called a development database or simply a dev database.

Staging/UAT/Pre-Prod Environment

The staging environment is similar to the production environment as it can be. You’ll have all of the code on a server this time instead of a local machine.

All of the hardcore testings happens here. Any database migrations will be tested here and so will any configuration changes. When you have to do major version updates, the stage environment helps you find and fix any issues that come up too.

The staging environment is usually tested by the tester/QA team or by the client. The client will be able to see how things will work when they make it live and they will be able to give the developers any feedback they need.

The database you create for the client is called a staging database or simply a stage/uat database.

Production Environment

The production environment is where users access the final code after all of the updates and testing. Of all the environments, this one is the most important.

The production environment is where the end-users will access or submit the data.

This is the most critical environment where a database administrator has to concentrate on.

The database you create for the end-user is called a production database or simply a prod database.

Often, the database administrator has to copy tables or data between the environments which is called the data refresh activity which we are going to discuss later in the subsequent lessons.