large-databases

I am managing a site with over 19 million business listings. Cloning a database this size is daunting and time-consuming. Most of this data is static, but there are some definite advantages to managing it as nodes. In a perfect world, I'd like to be able to move these 19M nodes to a separate database so that I could easily clone the rest of it for development and testing, but I can't think of any way to do that that will allow me to keep working with the data through the Drupal Node Module with its incumbent advantages.