Every company should have a program that can be run to sanitize the live database for use in testing.
+1.
However, modifying or sometimes even a dump/load on a SQL database can change its behavior dramatically.
But the harder part can be getting a hardware setup similar to production. Most places want their newest, best hardware in production for obvious reasons. Few places want to pay for mirror-image production systems just for testing to bang on.
There's the old saying: If you have two systems, 'production' and 'testing', the one with the more challenging load is 'testing'.
+1.
However, modifying or sometimes even a dump/load on a SQL database can change its behavior dramatically.
But the harder part can be getting a hardware setup similar to production. Most places want their newest, best hardware in production for obvious reasons. Few places want to pay for mirror-image production systems just for testing to bang on.
There's the old saying: If you have two systems, 'production' and 'testing', the one with the more challenging load is 'testing'.