need short term solution - long term solution on hold

hello everyone,
i've been trying to set up a long term solution replicating data from
our production database into our development and staging environments.
from what i've seen, the simplest way to do this is to restore from
back up. unfortunately the production devices are on a remote network,
and i'm still trying to setup the necessary vpn connectivity between
them to do this restore-from-backup replication method.
in the mean time however, i do need some production data in the local
environments. the two instances can communicate on port 1433 just fine,
so what method would you guys recommend for getting a whole database
copied over to another server? the only real requirement is no downtime
on the production server. also, the server is currently spiking up to
about 25% max cpu, if possible i'd like a solution that doesn't bring
it to its knees.
don't want to merge data or transform anything. just want the entire
database (tables, procedures, keys, constraints, data) copied from one
server to another.
thanks for any suggestions,
jason
Jason,
as you want the entire database, presumably on a regular basis and taking
account of changes to all objects, there's no easy solution to this using
replication. EG replication won't take all the objects in a database -
several parts of the database catalog are not replicated. So, typically
log-shipping is used to solve this issue. This could be set up manually or
using the wizards. In the absence of a VPN the files could be transferred
using FTP and then moved and restored
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)
|||actually, i don't need it on a regular basis. for now i just need a
single image, which doesn't even have to be transactionally-up-to-date.
just something from the past "short while" would be adequate, and it
could be one-time only.
does that open up any easier possibilities?
|||In that case I'd zip up the backup, FTP it, unzip and restore.
Cheers,
Paul Ibison