To ensure a smoother transition to your production environment, first integrate CONNX into your development and testing environments.

Having CONNX integrated into your separate development and testing environments will help your enterprise. In most cases, you can identify problems and needed feature requests without impacting your production environment. If you believe there is a problem in the product, or in the application, and you need technical support's help, it is easier to isolate the problem to a simple reproducible example in a non-production environment.

CONNX uses standard APIs. This minimizes the CONNX learning curve. CONNX assumes that you are familiar with ODBC, JDBC, OleDB and .NET. You will find the ODBC, JDBC, OleDB and .NET documentation for your environment extremely helpful if you run into problems.

The development and testing environments are usually isolated from the production environment, and often from each other. Each isolated environment requires its own CDDs and its own set of CONNX licenses.

CONNX uses the CDD as a metadata repository to make different data sources appear as one. Treat the CDD like code and add it to a source repository. Back the CDD up on a regular basis. If CDD changes break an application, you may need to roll back to a previous CDD version.