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Right now this is just a theory so if I'm way off, feel free to comment and give some ideas (I'm running out of them). I guess it's more so an update to this question and as I look at the "related question" list -- there's a lot of 0 answers. This tells me there's a real gap.

We have multiple problems with our sql setups in general, the majority of which stem from stored procedures that have grown into monsters from hell and some other user functions skattered about into the db. My biggest concern is they're completely untested -- when something goes wrong, no one can say with 100% certainty "yes, I know for a fact this works". Makes debugging a recurring nightmare.

This afternoon, I got this crazy idea we could start writing some assemblies (CLR-ing yo!) for SQL and test them. I ran into the constraints (static methods only, safe/external/unsafe, etc) and overall, that didn't go all that well. At least not as well as I'd hoped and didn't help me move toward my goal.

I've also tried setting up data in a test by hand (they tried it here too before I showed up). Even using an ORM to seed the data -- this also becomes rather difficult very quickly and a maintenance hassle. Of course, most of this pain is in the data setup and not the actual test.

So what's out there now in 2011 that helps fix/curb this problem or have we (as devs) abandonded the idea of testing stored procedures because of the heavy cost?

Community
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jeriley
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4 Answers4

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You can actually make stored procedure tests as a project. Our DBEs at work do that - here's a link you might like: Database Unit Testing with Visual Studio

Tejs
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We've had a lot of success with DbFit.

Yes, there is a cost to setting up test data (there is no way to avoid this cost IMHO), but the Fitnesse platfom (on which DbFit is based) enables you to reuse data population scripts by including them within multiple tests.

benilov
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Ed Harper
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  • Interesting ... they want to do UI testing and Fitnesse came up (among a few others). Do you think that would be an easy way to do both? How similar are they? – jeriley May 12 '11 at 14:05
  • @jeriley - DbFit extends Fitnesse - it's a fixture for Fitnesse which allows database testing - so in a sense they are one in the same thing. – Ed Harper May 12 '11 at 15:16
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Can DBUnit help you?

Not used it much myself but you should be able to set the database to a known state, execute the procedure and then verify the data has changed as expected.

EDIT: After looking in to this more it would seem you need something like SQLunit rather than DBUnit. SQLUnit is described as

SQLUnit is a regression and unit testing harness for testing database stored procedures. An SQLUnit test suite would be written as an XML file. The SQLUnit harness, which is written in Java, uses the JUnit unit testing framework to convert the XML test specifications to JDBC calls and compare the results generated from the calls with the specified results.

There are downsides; it's Java based which might not be your preference and more importantly there doesn't seem to have been much activity on the project since June '06 :(

Tony
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  • I don't think DBUnit supports procedures directly. Use DbUnit to set up the initial state for your database, run code (in C#, from a unit test) which manipulates the database via the procedure then use DbUnit to make assertions about the resulting state. – Tony May 11 '11 at 21:04
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    Would the person who down voted my answer care to comment why? If I've said something wrong I'm keen to learn. – Tony Nov 28 '11 at 23:26
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Corporate culture rules the day. Some places test extensively. Other place, well, not so much.

I did a short-term contract with a Fortune 500 a few years ago. Design, build, and deploy internally. My database had to interface with two legacy systems. It was clear early on that I was going to have to spend more time testing that usual. (Some days, a query of historical data would return 35 rows. Other days the identical query would return 20,000 rows.)

I built a tool in Microsoft Access that stored and executed SQL statements. (Access was the only tool I was allowed to use.) I could build a current version of the database, populate it with test data, and run all the tests I'd built--several hundred of them--in about 20 minutes.

It helped a lot to be able to go into meetings armed with a one-page printout that said my code was working exactly like it was when they signed off on it. But it wasn't easily automated--most of the SQL was hand-coded.

Mike Sherrill 'Cat Recall'
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