Skip to main content

Real World Testing of PL/SQL Code - An Office Hours Session

Since February 2019, I've been running, with Chris Saxon, on my team of Developer Advocates, monthly PL/SQL Office Hours sessions. They generally consist of short presentations on a PL/SQL-related topic, followed by lots of interesting discussion - between Chris and I, with attendees on the session, and with other speakers.

On November 5 at 9 AM Eastern, I am very pleased to have a session focused on testing PL/SQL code, featuring developers who are doing it out there in the "real world."

No application will ever have zero bugs, but you sure want to keep them to a minimum. The best way to do this is to implement automated regression tests of your code, but "best" as usual does not equate to "easiest." Building and managing tests can be a big challenge, so in this Office Hours session, we will hear from developers who are doing just that. Learn from your peers about the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them. Bring your own stories and your questions, and let's all work together on improving our code quality!

Our first presenter will be Jasmin Fluri.
Ms. Fluri is an independent consultant at Schaltstelle GmbH and lectures on software engineering and code review at the University of Applied Sciences North-western Switzerland. Her focus as a database developer and DevOps engineer lies on continuous integration and delivery pipelines, automation of recurring tasks, PL/SQL development, data engineering, and data warehousing.

We will then hear from Maik Becker and Swathi Ambati of Triology.
"We had a requirement where we used to write unit tests for legacy code and we used utPLSQL framework. We have developed an App to save test results and to run multiple tests at once without writing any execution code and also show the result in a very efficient manner. Since the project was an APEX App, we decided to use APEX as well to run tests and visualize results."

Deepthi Bandari, a senior software engineer at Fidelity Investments, will share some of her joys and challenges when it comes to unit testing, test automation and promoting engineering excellent.

And they are not all! We'll hear from Patrick Barel, who is a PL/SQL Developer for Qualogy in the Netherlands. Besides working with SQL and PL/SQL he wrote different plug-ins for PL/SQL Developer, publishes articles on his own blog and is an Oracle ACE Director. Patrick is going to show what he's been doing with SQL Developer unit testing features and SQLcl commands.


We will also be joined by Samuel Nitsche, one of the core maintainers of utPLSQL:
Samuel Nitsche is a curiosity-driven software-developer with nearly 20 years of development experience, working at Smart Enterprise Solutions GmbH, a small software company in southern Germany. In his free time he writes regularly about database development and testing topics, presents at meetups and conferences (gladly in sith-robe) and works on making the framework "even more awesome."

If you have been doing any kind of automated regression testing of your Oracle Database code, we'd love to hear from you, whether you are using SQL Developer integrated unit testing, utPLSQL, Quest Code Tester, another open source framework...or even (especially!) your own "homegrown" approach.

All our welcome. Please do get in touch if you'd like to present your experiences.

Subscribe for reminders at the PL/SQL Office Hours home page so that you can get email reminders about this and other sessions!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running out of PGA memory with MULTISET ops? Watch out for DISTINCT!

A PL/SQL team inside Oracle made excellent use of nested tables and MULTISET operators in SQL, blending data in tables with procedurally-generated datasets (nested tables).  All was going well when they hit the dreaded: ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 2032 bytes  They asked for my help.  The error occurred on this SELECT: SELECT  *    FROM header_tab trx    WHERE (generated_ntab1 SUBMULTISET OF trx.column_ntab)       AND ((trx.column_ntab MULTISET             EXCEPT DISTINCT generated_ntab2) IS EMPTY) The problem is clearly related to the use of those nested tables. Now, there was clearly sufficient PGA for the nested tables themselves. So the problem was in executing the MULTISET-related functionality. We talked for a bit about dropping the use of nested tables and instead doing everything in SQL, to avoid the PGA error. That would, however require lots of work, revamping algorithms, ensuring correctness, you know the score. Then my eyes snagge
4 comments
Read more

How to Pick the Limit for BULK COLLECT

This question rolled into my In Box today: In the case of using the LIMIT clause of BULK COLLECT, how do we decide what value to use for the limit? First I give the quick answer, then I provide support for that answer Quick Answer Start with 100. That's the default (and only) setting for cursor FOR loop optimizations. It offers a sweet spot of improved performance over row-by-row and not-too-much PGA memory consumption. Test to see if that's fast enough (likely will be for many cases). If not, try higher values until you reach the performance level you need - and you are not consuming too much PGA memory.  Don't hard-code the limit value: make it a parameter to your subprogram or a constant in a package specification. Don't put anything in the collection you don't need. [from Giulio Dottorini] Remember: each session that runs this code will use that amount of memory. Background When you use BULK COLLECT, you retrieve more than row with each fetch,
4 comments
Read more

Quick Guide to User-Defined Types in Oracle PL/SQL

A Twitter follower recently asked for more information on user-defined types in the PL/SQL language, and I figured the best way to answer is to offer up this blog post. PL/SQL is a strongly-typed language . Before you can work with a variable or constant, it must be declared with a type (yes, PL/SQL also supports lots of implicit conversions from one type to another, but still, everything must be declared with a type). PL/SQL offers a wide array of pre-defined data types , both in the language natively (such as VARCHAR2, PLS_INTEGER, BOOLEAN, etc.) and in a variety of supplied packages (e.g., the NUMBER_TABLE collection type in the DBMS_SQL package). Data types in PL/SQL can be scalars, such as strings and numbers, or composite (consisting of one or more scalars), such as record types, collection types and object types. You can't really declare your own "user-defined" scalars, though you can define subtypes  from those scalars, which can be very helpful from the p
24 comments
Read more