Xp Databases Faq

From XpFaq

How do I test database tables?

1. Have each test set up its own state and return the DB to clean-and-pristine when it's done. The effort of doing this will be substantial at first, but over time is much less than the effort of finding defects that were masked by test sequencing, or false defects that were created by changes in test sequencing. That's one of the lessons of xUnit-test isolation is wonderful.

2. Don't assume one unit test per stored procedure.

--KentBeck

There is no substantial effort to do this for most DBMS. Any DBMS that has transaction processing requires just two statements to return the data to it's pretest state... Begin Transaction and Rollback.

A more significant issue is unit testing large data sets (when it's a requirement, or when it's impractical to create test data). If it takes to long to run the unit tests due to this, they won't be run.

--JeffWinchell

Some information about using in-memory databases to speed up unit tests can be found in EjbUnitTest.

see also: RefactoringWithRelationalDatabases, UnitTestsAndDatabases, MockObject

CategoryFaq CategoryExtremeProgramming