Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

The SQL Server Environment Approach

It is important to attempt to maintain a separate SQL Server environment for each phase in the development, quality control, implementation, and maintenance of a SQL Server implementation.

Depending on the organization's resources, the number of different environments might differ, but there should be at least a development environment, a quality control or test environment, and a production environment with clear boundaries between each. An organization might choose to add stress testing, user-acceptance, pre-production, and other environments, which can be considered subsets of the test environment. This chapter focuses primarily on the development, test, and production environments.

In an ideal configuration, ...