What are common approaches to getting data during development? So what should we as developers do instead? (ie if the scripts are a mess and difficult to use they'll cause more problems than they're worth).How the data is generated determines affects the initial start time of the database and the long-term maintainability and modifiability of the data generation process.The quantity of data generated determines the realism of the dataset and what issues may not be visible during development.Since even if you do nuke the database or DDOS yourself, it's a trivial task to refresh your development environment or re-generate the data you need.īy reducing the number of external dependencies during development we increase system consistency solving debugging and isolation issues.īut the additional value gained from data generation will depend on two major factors: The combination of using generated data with a locally running database will prevent any of those aforementioned problems from causing significant issues. How can generated data solve those problems?

Even if your database is running on a powerful server with plenty of resources, there's no reason to add to your monthly bill or leave the chance that a developer DDOS the database. It ties your development to the availability and uptime of an external system.Since every developer can affect the underlying data the application uses, it becomes harder to debug and performance test specific queries and features since the application state can change at any moment without you knowing. Furthermore, in larger teams the state sharing (due to database re-use) becomes a larger issue.Nobody thinks they'd ever accidentally nuke production until it happens to them. Even in a 1-person team, re-using the same database means any glitch or bug that you create during development spread to production.

There are a few serious reasons why you should strongly consider not going that route: The thinking is, 'if we need the most realistic data, what's more realistic than actual user generated data'. The biggest pitfall most developers can fall to is re-using the production database for developmentĭue to the complexity of this data, during the early development process of an application, its tempting to use the same database for production as for development.

Twitter would be quite useless if the only thing you could do is post and could only see a handful of others' tweets. Its this data that provides the vast majority of the application value. What this means is that often times applications will have features like the Twitter Feed, aggregated statistics, friends/followers and many other features that rely on complex inter-related data. Modern applications are, at least to some extent, data-rich.

Install mongodb for mac using docker