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AX 2012 R2 - how do I refresh the bussiness data on Test enviroment

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Posted on by Gill Darmon

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Hi,

I am using AX 2012 R2, Does anyone knows how can i refresh my test enviroment business data ?

Will backup and restore of the business data DB do the work?

Thanks,

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Andy Adamak 4,074 on at

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If R2 is anything like regular 2012, a backup/restore of the DB will do just fine. We constantly are refreshing dev environments with backups from our live server. If you are grabbing data from a different server, just make sure you change any settings still pointing to live server! Such as Report Server, Analysis Server, Enterprise portal, batch servers, etc etc (AX 2012). Not sure how much harm you could do, but better safe than sorry.

If you are grabbing an old backup from your test environment, then a straight up backup/restore should do the trick. Just keep in mind all the things AX stores in a database (users, settings, etc) and make sure you get a good backup after all that is setup. Also keep in mind if you refresh the AX database, any report updates you've deployed to the report server are still there. You'll have to redeploy the reports from the AOT to "undo" your report updates.

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Gill Darmon 390 on at

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Thank you for your answer Andy ,

The R2 DB is different, the model store and the business data are stored in separate databases. In other versions of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the model store and business data are stored in a single database.

Taking in consideration all you said above regarding the settings –

How do you refresh Dev environment with live ?

If there is ongoing dev work – by doing a backup/restore of the DB you will lose all your new development, since the DB (ax 2012) that is restored contains the live server model store.

Thinking about it..

Are you doing the following steps for ax 2012 :

1.Full backup of live DB.

2.Export model store of Dev environment.

3.Restore the DB of the live environment on Dev environment.

4.Import model store of dev environment.

Am I missing something ?

Having said that, since on R2 the business data and model store are stored in separate DB.

I was thinking to avoid all the steps above and just backup the business data DB from live and restore it on the Dev environment.

Do you think it is possible?

Gill

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Andy Adamak 4,074 on at

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Interesting. I didn't know that about R2, but it makes sense.

I have the luxury of having my own VM AX environment - so yes, I do something like you say. I'll usually export what I've been working on, then restore the DB, then import my project(s) again.

I think just restoring the Data DB would do the trick. I would back up both first just to be safe, so that in the event something gets messed up you can revert back. I like virtual machines for this reason: I can just take a snapshot, restore the db and if all goes well, delete the snapshot (or revert back to the snapshot if it fails).

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Tommy Skaue Moderator on at

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In R2 you can backup your business database and restore it your other environment (test or dev). The application is persisted in the model-database in R2.

And as Andy pointed out, you should make sure your environment specific data is updated to reflected. The Reporting Server settings are located in the table SRSSERVERS. If you want your batchjobs to work in the new environment, update BATCHSERVERGROUP and BATCH to use the correct SERVERID. You can also disable your batches by setting STATUS to 0 in BATCH and BATCHJOB. I normally clean out SYSSERVERCONFIG, SYSSERVERSESSIONS and SYSSQMSETTINGS while the AOS is down. These tables will be initialized with new and fresh unique values. You can create yourself a SQL script you can run after each time you update your environments with fresh data, and run it after the database restore and before you start the AOS.

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Gill Darmon 390 on at

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Did it.

Thank you very much guys !

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Stefano Lorenzoni 115 on at

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Very interesting!!!! I'm looking to do that.

But... one question.....

I wanto to copy only business data from my PROD environment to my DEV enviroment.

Actually my DEV environment contains some differences due to some developments that we are testing and there are some tables that have new fields.

What will happen if I backup PROD business database and restore it in place of DEV one?

Is AX able to recreate the missing fields thanks to the model db?

Shall I have to do some operation (for instance syncro)?

Thanks in advance

Stefano

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Martin Dráb 237,967 Most Valuable Professional on at

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AX is able to recreate missing fields on synchronization, but you will obviously lose data.

I would recommend using the Test Data Transfer Tool; it's able to deal with schema differences, you can filter out tables that you don't want to overwrite and so on.

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