Question: I've looked around the Wordpress forums about this and didn't find anything so I thought I might try here.

If you have a staging/dev Wordpress setup used for testing new pluging and such, how do you go about migrating the data in the staging database back to the production database? Is there a "Wordpress best practices" way to do this, or am I limited to having to manually migrate tables from one database to the other?

Answer: 
The two methods would be using the export/import feature under tools or copying the database. I email myself a copy of my production database weekly using the WordPress Database Backup plugin.

The import feature can be problematic for moving a wordpress blog as you have to configure your php.ini file often because the default value of files you can upload on a hosted php implementation tends to be too small by default.
You need to handle the serialized objects. Here is a [client side HTML5 utility](http://petesaia.com/work/peach/) to handle it. Because it is all javascript, it's quite fast.

The alternative would be hooking a bash script into your deployment. So once the site is deployed, the db is backed up and deserialized with the new domain.