i have absolutely no experience or knowledge in IT/computer science whatsoever. i saw a post about someone who messed up at work by ‘deleting prod’, and apparently that’s a super big deal. google isn’t helping bc i don’t understand any of these CS terms.
In: Technology
To start, a database in this context is like a big book full of all kinds of information. This is all of the information you see in an application; text, images. The front end of the application is code that is asking for information from that book to be displayed to the user in a way that makes sense.
To build apps developers usually have 3 versions of the code and the database: Production, Staging, Development. Then each developer pulls/pushes the code they work on between their local machine and development which makes for a kind of 4th environment.
When the team is done working on a particular feature in development, they will push that to staging. Staging is meant to be as close to production as possible for testing. If everything checks out staging is pushed to production and the users now have a new version of the app.
In a perfect world developers never write code or work with the database in production for safety reasons. So it would be incredibly rare to delete the production database completely in development work flow that is properly controlled. Even if it did happen, it would be even more rare for there not to be a backup of production. And when pushing updates from staging to production, it is not uncommon for teams to clone production again and practice pushing from staging to production so that they can minimize issues in the workflow before doing doing it live.
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