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Fun Times with WordPress Databases

I've been working with WordPress for a long time now, and have developed a pretty solid workflow to get a local database onto a dev environment and then over to live.

Listening to shows like ShopTalkShow has shown me how other people might approach the tasks of database management and specifically over to the plugin WP DB Migrate Pro.

My current process is pretty standard and uses Sequel Pro as the main database interaction. It goes a little something like; Access the required database to pull it down, update the references and then upload the new .sql file to the required environment. Pretty simple and can take around 6 and a half minutes.

Now, with 3 environments and having to do this after any local, development or live changes multiple times a day, the time it takes to get this done goes up quite a bit.

I’ve came across some issues recently with files inexplicably becoming corrupt when trying to upload them via Sequel Pro and also not actually being able to access a database directly due to it’s security/privacy settings. Not a big problem when you have access to phpMyAdmin or a site’s control panel, but then we’re getting into the tens of minutes to backup the database and upload a file in it’s place.

I heard about WP DB Migrate Pro a good while ago but never felt the need to get involved with it, despite the great feedback I’d heard on how well it worked. I decided to pull the trigger and purchase a personal licence recently.

By gum. What a dream.

At first, I freaked out a little and didn’t have a clue what I was doing (at the time I was setting up hosting and was had my head buried in some strange PHP issues) but after composing myself and clicking a couple of buttons I had a zip file on my desktop containing an database dump. After that I pressed a couple more buttons, saved a couple of environment profiles and had pulled another version of the database into my new local environment.

Not sure I could have even opened Sequel Pro that fast!