US Patent 9721116 Test sandbox in production systems during productive use

Methods and systems are directed to controlling access to data in a production environment. Production data may be stored in a production database and test data may be stored in a test database. A production application may have access only to the data in the production database while a test application may have access to both the production database and the test database. The test application may have read-only access to the production database and read-write access to the test database. Data in the test database may be handled differently than data in the production database. A type of data may be associated with a range of valid values. The values assigned to the elements may differ depending on whether the elements are stored in the production database or the test database.