Promote Dev to Live without promoting test customers / transactions

I am developing a small website for a client. We are almost at the point where we are ready to go live. I have a clean install ready on the hosting site so I know that the database exists and works on the live system.

I have seen a number of articles and walk throughs for pushing an installation to live, and they all assume that _all_ of the data will be pushed to live. When I promote the code/database from Dev to Live, I do not want the test customers to go live, nor do I want any of their orders. (For some reason the client does not want Testy McTestface as a customer in the live server ) I could just upload everything and then delete the customers, but then the invoicing / order numbers would not be starting from scratch. Also, when I make future changes I want to make sure that I do not overwrite live customers with test data.

What set of tables should I _not_ be uploading to the live server if I do not wish to make the test customers and their orders live? I want everything in Catalog, but nothing from Customers, as you would see it on the admin site.

regards
Frugal

No OC version posted. However, in your admin - > systems - > settings - > edit settings - > server tab - > Maintenance Mode , you could set it to on. Then, from the customer's account page from the admin, you could login into the customer's account and test your transactions as if you were a regular customer without any other customers being able to travel your store until the Maintenance Mode is set back to Off.

Sorry, 3.0.2.0

I can use Maintenance mode to smoke test the live site once I have pushed it to live, but how do I ensure that all of the test transactions on the Dev site are not pushed to live with the rest of the update? Do I just exclude the oc_customer_* and oc_order_* tables from the update? Or are there other things I need to take into account.

regards,
Frugal

Which is why, when upgrading the platform, all extensions must be uninstalled to ensure that no operations are running live and also to keep the database clean while the store is set under maintenance mode.