I have a main architecture with a MySql db, replication and backup, it's working fine. Now I also have a development server where I play with the code and I would like to use the data from the main db to play too, with reads and writes. How can I set up the replication to have some real data coming from the main db to the development db? Should I replicate permanently or only once a day to keep some sort of consistency during tests on dev db? Any idea / strategy is welcome.
Edit: ok so to clarify the kind of application I use is a web app development with Django. The idea is to test some new features on the development server. The need to write is important, a read only database won't be enough to run the tests thoroughly. For the moment the database takes a fairly reasonable amount of time to dump to another server (something like 10 minutes), but it's growing.