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Customers should leverage separate Development, QA and/or Test, and Production environments. We have customers who did not have a separate development environment, but rather they performed all changes in their production environment. In those cases, we contend they only have a development environment because everything and anything could be updated as though it were in development.
In many companies. SOX compliance requires not only separate environments, but also separation of duties between the different environments. Though some companies may not require separation of duties, a systematic approach to development, and the promotion of objects through a QA/Test process and, after passing QA/Test, on to Production, is considered a best practice for any system.
Backup your metadata daily using the Metadata Backup Utility. The Metadata Backup Utility can backup most objects that can be configured in the Dodeca administrative interface. Those objects include Views, Spreadsheet Templates, Workbook Scripts, Selectors, Selector Lists, Essbase Connections, SQL Connections, and SQLPassthroughDataSets, among others.
The Metadata Backup Utility is written in Java and thus runs on most operating systems, including servers.
Note: Beginning with Dodeca version 8.0, the Metadata Backup Utility functionality is built into the Dodeca Shell command line utility. Dodeca Shell is also written in Java but is designed to be both more secure and to provide automation capabilities.
Not all repository data is part of the metadata backups, thus we recommend you perform routine repository backups at the database level in order to backup comments, the data audit log, metadata audit log, view usage log, users, roles, and user/role mappings.
Beginning in Dodeca version 8.0, Dodeca Shell with provide backup capabilities for more of the data in the repository including comments and the data audit log, however, we still recommend regular database level backups of the full Dodeca repository.