A better way to do clone exclusions or deletion to stop ghost or shadow data on target instances

DomenicFP
Tera Contributor

During our cloning process we do the following;

We clone from Production with no exclusions to our Test instance, then clone down to our other instances excluding tables and many tables extend from the task table, but we exclude the child tables and not the task table due to needing some data. That does work but it leaves some data behind. (I call it ghost or shadow data because it will show in some list or reports, but the record is not actually present. You can click on the link and see that the record is no longer there. I spoke with SN and they explained that it is due to the child table extending from the task table. I think the best way for it not to happen is to exclude the task table, but that is very heavy handed.

This week I tried something different on our non-prd and non-tst instances by running scheduled jobs deleting the records from the task table by defining class "sys_class_name" after cloning. One table of records took about 2-3 hours because there were only 40,000 records and no ghost or shadow data, so it worked. But the incident table has 610,000+ records and we estimate the job will need 2.5 days to complete. We found a good medium of 200 records every minute and it has been running for about a days and our estimate is about right. This was the first time we did this and I do not believe this is the optimum practice.

We thought about a clone schedule that would have one instance like DEV run the script and then clone down to the others. It still prolongs the clone schedule. All ideas would be appreciated.

We were looking for the main cause of the issue and the only thing I could think of without forgoing a lot of testing, was that OOB collection of the task table gathers short description for tables of tasks, which would include the hr_case table because that extends from sm_order table (pre-scoped HR application and post scoped HR application sn_hr_core_case), which both extend from the task table. I think we would need to remove "short_description" attribute from the task table collection record and add it to each child table of the task table, but that most likely would break something.

Plus, I just realized we need to change the way we grant developers access because we started with Berlin and have not changed since. They get admin rights and we do not use application development as we should, but that is a whole other discussion.

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