Most online stores operate 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, making it difficult to perform maintenance or test changes to the system. The WebSphere Commerce staging server allows the Site Administrator to update the data on the staging server and test the changes, and then propagate the change to the production server. This is useful for testing updates to the product catalog, but it is also important for testing new shopping process commands.
The staging server consists of the following components:
- A WebSphere Commerce instance
- Tests and modifies your data.
- Database schema
- The staging database contains the same schema and tables as the production database, plus a set of triggers to log changes made in the staging database.
Changes are logged to the STAGLOG table (a staging table) using database triggers. Whenever you change a database table record in the staging database, the STAGLOG table records this change. For each modified record, a trigger records the type of modification, (insert, delete, or update), the name of the table where the record resides, and the record's primary key or unique index.
- The Stage Copy utility
- Allows an administrator to copy data from the production database to the staging database. You can copy the data into site-related tables, merchant-related tables, or individual tables. The Stage Copy utility should only be used in specific administrative situations, such as setting up a new staging server or recovery from a corrupt staging server database. An administrator should not make day to day changes on the production server and routinely use Stage Copy to copy the data to the staging server.
- The Stage Propagate utility
- Allows an administrator to propagate changes from the staging database to the production database. The information in the STAGLOG table identifies the records in the staging database that must be inserted, updated, or deleted in the production database. The identified records are then updated in the production database. Processed records are indicated in the STAGLOG table by a 1 in the STGPROCESSED column.
- The Stage Check utility
- Allows an administrator to check for potential unique index key conflicts between two tables on a staging server and a production server.