Channing K Jackson:
Is there anything specific to watch out for if we want to refresh our DEV database with the data from our PROD database?
Yes - sure.
Most importantly:
If you have public sign up, make sure that the DEV system can't send mails to people being signed up - better: Change personal information completely and set mailaddresses to artificial internal addresses. You also might want to change the mail texts to something indicating the origin of the mails (This might not apply if you don't have public sign ups)
But I guess you were asking this question with a technical perspective.
Of course: Make a backup before changing anything. There should be no problem just copying the database to the dev environment, provided that the webserver is down when you change the database (so that the cache will be empty on restart)
Liferay does not only save data to the database but also to a Jackrabbit repository, by default in its data directory if I recall correctly. You can configure this to be in the database, but if you have not you might need to copy this data as well.
Also the Lucene index files reside in this directory so you might want to reindex your content after you copied the database.
Make sure that the production and development properties files are matching with regards to the places where the data is stored.
You might also want to look at replicating (staging) between the two environments. This is basically done by exporting/importing a *.lar file from one instance to another. Note that the upload limitations (or some other file size limitation) applies to this export/import/staging too and the error message does not help a lot when you exceed this limit. With staging you can even synchronize between two environments using completely different databases (vendors, versions, OS etc.)
