Release Management - releasing to a subset of users - how would it work for a public facing website

Question

I read somewhere (sorry don\'t exactly remember the source) that facebook has release Tuesdays. They release the new features to their internal employees first, then to a sm

Answer 1

Maybe I'm simplifying here but why not just instance the database further?

When you are doing a subset of users to "test" be it internal, subset of external, or the world aren't you in fact performing something like a beta test? Wouldn't this call for a different instance of the database that has the beta version of the stored procs vs. the current version/instance? Just a matter of pointing connection strings in web configs at that point isn't it?

Maybe the constraint here is cost of servers and "huge data" being on them, which I'll admit I'm glancing over or is the question really about versioning the stored prococedures, etc.? Can't they just be source controlled as well as the schema changes?

I've probably asked more than answered.