NoSQL development/production database

Question

I am in charge of the database for an application that we are developing and I am starting to get confused on how to use my development database.

I understand that having two separate databases is useful, helps while developing new features or change the database structure and this is why we actually have a production database and a development database. However as the project grows I am slowly getting confused on how I should use the development database and the development environment as a whole.

Our data is stored in Firestore which is a NoSQL database. We use it to store real time data that need to be accessed both by users and by a growing number of scripts that process the data to create some more. This real time data is also useful while developing to monitor the behavior related to the changes we made for a specific feature (on our test app).

So my question is :

Should my development database be a copy of the production database (copy every insert, update, delete ...) and should we duplicate all our scripts (one on the production environment and one on the development environment) that process the data ? In which case I would need to create connexions between each database and the costs related to storing and processing the data would double.
Or should I just use the development database as a database with the same structure as my production database, with less data and just pull some data or activate some pipelines to redirect some real time data when I need to test a new feature or a change in my database.

Also if you know a good book that I could read on the subject I'd take it !

Thank you,

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65936526/nosql-development-production-database

Answer 1

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