6/28/2021 Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough | by Christopher Heppell | Spawn DB | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Development databases in Docker aren’t good

enough
Christopher Heppell Follow
Jun 23 · 3 min read

Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough on their own. Why? Because
they’re almost always so far from the production environment characteristics that you
get a false sense of security in development.

JBD ヤナ ドガン
@rakyll
I think I lost more data due to database bugs in production
than anything else.
8:57 PM · Jun 19, 2021
108 9 Copy link to Tweet
Database bugs in production happen often because of characteristics you missed in lower environments

Having isolated databases is far better than a shared environment where other
developers trample over your changes. But because dev databases tend to either be
empty, or have “happy path” data within them, they never truly demonstrate the
behaviours you’ll end up seeing in production.

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6/28/2021 Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough | by Christopher Heppell | Spawn DB | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Photo by Shanon Palomino Salinas on Unsplash

This leads to a variety of different problems:

Unexpected data loss during schema migrations

Unacceptable latency on specific queries because of vastly different data sizes

Poor UX due to unanticipated user-provided data

UI glitches or performance issues not caught in lower environments because of

unrealistic data

Entire branches of code left unexercised due to conditions on the data not caught in
lower environments

It can be slightly better

One thing you could do is to grab a production-like backup and restore that to your
lower environments like development. One issue with that is how long that can take. If
your production data is on the order of gigabytes, then you’re looking at potentially
hours to restore that data. And what happens if you mess it up in dev? You’ll have to
restore all over again.

Even then, you need somewhere to store that data on your machine and dedicate the
necessary compute for it — taking away those precious CPU cycles from your responsive
development experience.

It can be much better

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6/28/2021 Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough | by Christopher Heppell | Spawn DB | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Docker solves the problem of no longer needing to worry about how to install database
engines on your machine. You get deterministic environments that are the same as the
rest of your development team due to the containerised nature.

But it’s not as easy as that. You still need to know the specifics about how to mount
persistent volumes so your data doesn’t disappear when your container stops. You still
need to know how to handle readiness checks of those databases. You still need to know
the specific flags or environment variables to pass on startup to ensure that your
database is ready to go. That’s extra overhead and expertise for devs to apply in addition
to the task they are actually working on.

Thankfully, spinning up a variety of different database engines from production-like

datasets instantly regardless of datasize is possible with Spawn. Now, your entire dev
team have the same database environment but also exactly the same data.

Whether it’s MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL or Redis there’s a single unified
command for bringing up a copy of a production-like data set instantly for you to start
using in development and CI:

spawnctl create data-container --image postgres11:prod --name my-

copy-of-prod

Once you’ve got that instance, you can manipulate it in ways you’ve never been able to
before.

Accidentally deleted all the rows because of a missed WHERE clause?

spawnctl reset data-container my-copy-of-prod

Managed to reproduce a bug you want to share with a colleague?

spawnctl save data-container my-copy-of-prod

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6/28/2021 Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough | by Christopher Heppell | Spawn DB | Jun, 2021 | Medium

spawnctl graduate data-container my-copy-of-prod --revision rev.1 --

team devs

Want to swap between branches and keep your database changes with them?

spawnctl create data-container --name feature-branch1

spawnctl create data-container --name feature-branch2

Forget about remembering flags, environment variables, and Docker config. Get back
your time, CPU cycles and disk space with Spawn right now for free.

Originally posted on the Spawn blog

Docker Database Development Containers

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