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1. Staging DB spins up empty. You create a user during use, probably data is never cleaned, reproducing prod issues is kind of a pain.
2. Staging DB is populated with some dummy data from scripts, possibly as part of deployment. Nice but you have to maintain the scripts.
3. Staging gets a copy of prod. Great for reproducing issues from prod, and possibly viable at small scale, but has some security issues - you'd probably need to censor some columns.
Perhaps there are other options, or ways to alleviate the pain here?