Realize that to connect to a database, you have to give some pieces of information - one of them the name to the database server. Suppose one of your database servers (logical) name is grapefruit. Then make it so that in your production environment grapefruit points to the production database, and in your testing environment, grapefruit points to your testing database.

The advantage is that you only have to do this once, and every program can benefit from it. It also prevents you from accidentely accessing a production database from a testing environment because you set the wrong environment variable, or used the wrong configuration file.

Abigail