Comment by Fakiolas Marios on "How do you share database among team members?"

CommentHow do you share database among team members?

Fakiolas Marios

Full-stack JavaScript lover, happy husband, proud father 😉 - Head of Web & Frontend at @omilialtd

Apr 4, 2017

Sharing DB files among team members is a bad sign and i have seen people losing their job by doing this because one day they destroyed part of the real DB. So please don't do this for your own good.

I highly recommend to play with dummy data by using migrations and seeds. Also you can create a Docker container and provide a solid development environment for your team members. So with a couple of commands or a make file the whole environment can start, reset etc without having to share DB files with others.

Josh Montgomery

web developer

Apr 4, 2017

I'm curious on why you think it's a bad idea? if you work in a team of 5-10, if they're all sharing on DB, isn't that putting potential risk of one of the members breaking something that others will be affected by?

I personally prefer using migrations and seeders and then reproduce project's DB with a single command or so. That way everyone is working with dummy data with same schema. Also by doing so even new members can get started and setup their development environment really fast.

I 've seen people sharing real DB dumb files here and there or adding .sql files in the main repo. This is really bad and unsafe and doesn't ensure that this is the very latest accurate copy.

Also by using migrations and seeders all this mechanism is controlled by git VCS so there is no need for sloppy copy / pasting. By sharing sql files here and there you cannot track history that accurately.

Recently i heard about a company from a friend of mine where a developer had to do some DB work and uploaded accidentally an outdated .sql file from the repo to the real DB so they lost tons of real data that way. This file shouldn't exist in the first place.

Search Hashnode