Migrating between environments (dev to test to staging to prod)

[coreym]

I am working out the deployment procedures required to migrate changes from a development environment to a production environment. The simplified flow below intentionally ignores test and staging for brevity.

 

The flow is similar to the following:

 

Step 1: Clone production site to development server

 

This creates a point in time snapshop of the production environment to begin new modifications.

 

Step 2: Modify theme, store configurations, install modules, etc.

 

Everything but product, customer, and order related tables are modified. Only core and module tables, along with theme code is changed here.

 

Step 3: Migrate core system, theme and module modifications to production.

 

Push all core & module changes to production overwritting production core and module tables, and push all new code / theme code to production. No customer, order, or product data is modified.

 

Step 4: Start over from Step 1 when new core system, theme, or module modifications are required.

 

For step three I would like to only migrate the non-customer / order / product related tables.

 

My question:

 

Does anyone have a list of which tables are required for customer, order, and product functionality so that I can exclude those from the migration scripts?