Skip to main content

PL/SQL Office Hours: DB Setup and Teardown for Automated Testing

On January 14, 2020 at 9 AM Eastern, I am very pleased to hold a PL/SQL Office Hours session on one of the biggest challenges faced by developers setting up automated tests for database code: setup and teardown.

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!

For this session, we have two presenters: Deepti Bandari and Jasmin Fluri.

Deepti Bandari is a senior software engineer at Fidelity Investments since 2013. Her focus areas include database design and development, test automation and promoting engineering excellence. She will share her experience with data setup and teardown for testing pl/sql, including:

* Testing complex code in a monolithic database. * How to setup data so tests can run fast, in isolation, and are repeatable
* Working with hierarchical data with a lot of dependent tables
* When to rely on existing data in environments


Jasmin 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.

Jasmin will talk about stages of testing and management of test data. She will show examples on how to prepare and arrange unit test with test data in development environments. Important points on what to consider when starting with unit testing and test data are explained.

We hope to see you at the session. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if you have some experiences in this area, as well. We hope you will share them with all attendees. Please do get in touch in advance if you'd like to present those experiences as more than a comment in the chat. I'll add you to our agenda.

Finally, subscribe for reminders at the PL/SQL Office Hours home page so that you can get email reminders about this and other sessions!
Labels:

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 wo...
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

Why DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE should not be in your application code

A database developer recently came across my  Bulletproof PL/SQL  presentation, which includes this slide. That first item in the list caught his attention: Never put calls to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE in your application code. So he sent me an email asking why I would say that. Well, I suppose that is the problem with publishing slide decks. All the explanatory verbiage is missing. I suppose maybe I should do a video. :-) But in the meantime, allow me to explain. First, what does DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE do? It writes text out to a buffer, and when your current PL/SQL block terminates, the buffer is displayed on your screen. [Note: there can be more to it than that. For example, you could in your own code call DBMS_OUTPUT.GET_LINE(S) to get the contents of the buffer and do something with it, but I will keep things simple right now.] Second, if I am telling you not to use this built-in, how could text from your program be displayed on your screen? Not without a lot o...
4 comments
Read more