Development copy updates VisualSVN Server

Hi Experts,

I am making the very gradual move to version control for my developments via Tortoise SVN as a client and VisualSVN server as the (you guessed it) server.

There are two questions that have been bugging me for a while, and are currently stopping me making the switch.

1.) When I do a comit to the server of the latest version of some code, I would like for that server to then automatically update the client viewing version of it.

So basically, our testing is in two stages.

 a.) Local testing on my machine after updates, to check functionality.
 b.) Uploaded then to live development server for client to see

So when I comit a change, I would like the system to also update another directory on that same server with the newer files.

Is this even possible with Visual SVN server? Should I change to something else to make this easier?


The second question is about updating the production server.

Basically, my question is, do I have to install a version control client like Tortoise SVN on my main server, and then every time I want to update it, then let it pull down a specific revision of the application?



I do have another point, that's less of a question and more of a request for your ideas.

3.) The databases on some of our projects are anywhere from 10 to 100mb in size. Now when users are in the office, this is not an issue, they use the development server copy of the database (which is updated automatically every night to shadow the live database).

However when they leave the office, they would have to take an SQL dump of the database and import it.

Would you think it worth it for me to write a script that does this?

That literally downloads a copy of the database from our development server before the user leaves the office, and then updates their local database?

What are your thoughts on that? How do you do it?

For reference by the way, almost all projects are web applications written in PHP and MySQL

Thanks!