I have a production and staging server setup to do synchronization. I did a compare against both databases recently after doing a full sync of the production system from staging. I noticed there were tons of differences between them. Is this normal to have? Some seemed to be rather different, such as the same workflow having different indexes. I want to make sure as we move towards launching this site that we wont run into any differences that will cause code to not migrate from staging to production correctly.

Also, I have a development box that synchronizes with content staging so I can post changes while my content authors write stuff. I am done with my work and have pushed all the work I have to staging. Can I now just grab the database from staging or production and ensure they are REALLY alll in synch? I noticed the same differences between production and dev databases that I did with production. I am just wondering which machine really should be the "gold" version since they seem to be not 100% in sync from a database point of view.