in reply to Testing & Databases

In addition to everything that everyone else has said, make sure that you have sufficient separation between your testing environment and your production envrionment. In this case, you could do a number of things:
  • Have the name of the database be configurable at run time. Or perhaps just overridable (i.e. provide a reasonable default and a switch that you provide on the command line to override it).
  • Have your testing environment be oblivious to the production environment (i.e. it cannot connect to your.prodenv.com).
  • Use different user ids, and giver permissions on the server and the database based on the user id.
...and the list goes on.

thor