The stagingcopy utility and the production database

The stagingcopy utility allows an administrator to copy data from the production database to the staging database. Use the stagingcopy utility for specific administrative situations, such as setting up a new staging environment or recovering a corrupted staging environment database.

Note: This information also applies to synchronizing on an authoring database if the workspace feature is enabled.

The stagingcopy utility ensures that the production and staging databases are synchronized. After the stagingcopy utility runs successfully, do not update the database tables managed by the staging environment to the production database. Instead, update these tables in the staging environment and then propagate the changes to the production database using the stagingprop utility. Updating staging environment-managed tables on the production database will likely fail because of a potential key conflict or reference integrity violation. To update the staging environment-managed tables in the production environment database, use the stagingcopy utility to synchronize the staging and production databases.

To ensure that the staging-enabled tables are never updated on the production database, the tables must be under the control of a Site Administrator only. In some cases, the staging-enabled tables in our production database are updated by an individual customer or merchant after the data was copied by stagingcopy. For example, we cannot prohibit a merchant from modifying the OFFER table in the production database after copying to the production database. In this situation, the OFFER table cannot be managed by the staging environment.

After the data is copied from the production database to the authoring database, we must run a full index build on the authoring environment. See Building the WebSphere Commerce Search index.

Related reference
Examples of copying data to the production-ready database