I have a dev sql server for a data warehouse that uses a well known application to present and report on the data. So that the developers can work with current data, I made a job that sync’s all of the dimension tables and select fact tables from production down to dev every day when no-one is using the app. This pumps several GB of data across our network and takes about an hour to run. This way the data in dev is recent and there is no reason to unnecessarily do the daily data load ETL process. The data in the dev environment is one day behind the data in production. When I made the sync job this was discussed and agreed this was sufficient for the developers to work with.
After figuring out recently that the developers were still doing some development on our production app (that means making new reports that hit the production database, no database structure changes), I adamently requested that they immediately move all development to the development server. (I’m such a mean old DBA!) So, they scheduled a cut over date that has already been missed but have scheduled another one. I hope they actually make this date. While discussing how to sync up DTS packages and other jobs, the developers mentioned that the normal daily data load ETL job for the data warehouse is working in development. This means that we don’t need the job I made to sync dev to production. No big deal, I thought, have one or the other job run but not both.
The developers want both to run. The reason that they state for this is that if the daily load ETL breaks then the sync job will still be running. I don’t think there is any guarantee of this, but that is what they say. Since this is a dev box, I don’t REALLY care but I do think that it is silly to have both jobs running. I am kinda funny about wasteful things when it comes to my database servers. Actually, if I had not spent the time making the sync job, I doubt that I would care at all.
So, should I let both jobs continue to run or only allow one job to run?