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!

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