Greetings,
We are looking to do a daily refresh of data in a test environment with data from the production environment. Our dba is looking into doing a refresh based on exports and imports or blasting the test env and recreating using backups of prod and I am looking into possible solutions from inside the database. We are upgrading to 10g but I am more familiar with 8i and a little 9i. I was goign to use dbms_job to run a script which either merges data from prod to test using a dblink or truncating the test table then inserting data from the prod table. This script would have to have a statement for each table to be refreshed and seemed like it'd be a nightmare to maintain and still have problems when the objects change due to development. I was wondering if other people had different methods of keeping a test environment data refreshed hopefully on a daily basis that would be more reliable or easier to maintain. Thanks for any suggestions!

from my perspective, an acceptable solution depends upon DB size.
What might work for a "small" DB may not scale to a much larger DB.

Rather than a daily refresh, what about a weekly refresh?
Why is any "frequent" refresh an actual requirement; as opposed a nice to have feature?

It's a fairly small db about 70 gb total and the frequency isn't as important as an automated solution that can be scheduled to run regularly and reliably without manual intervention.

You could always automate your DB recovery script to restore most recent Prod backup on Dev.