Gojko Adzic

New version of DbFit (0.92) is now available for download from SourceForge. Here are the most important changes:

• Better error handling, DbFit now prints out missing column/parameter names and warns if table/procedure could not be found
• new Inspect fixture to help with regression tests: DatabaseTest has three methods to automate it: InspectQuery, InspectProcedure and InspectTable. These methods will quickly print out entire query results, structure of a procedure or a table/view in a form that can be easily converted to a regression test, or used as a template for ExecuteProcedure, Insert or Update tables.
• support for Oracle procedure and package synonyms
• Type details are read from SqlServer in a more efficient way, supporting objects with dots in names and fixing
  a few edge cases where duplicate records were retrieved with 0.91
• null keyword handled correctly in Java

For more information, see DbFit project pages

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with mid-size and large UK bookmakers, trying to introduce agile development practices into those environments on several projects. Although for most of the readers of this blog using agile practices is no longer a question, agile development is fairly rare when it comes to databases, and all these systems were heavily database-centric. About a year ago, I finally found the right formula to do agile development on top of big legacy databases. I presented my experiences at XpDay 07 in London, on a session called “Fighting the monster - agile development on top of legacy databases”. This is the content from that presentation. Continue Reading »

The DbFit User guide is finally updated to reflect all the changes in the past few months. It is now called Getting Fit With Databases (to reflect that SQLServer and MySQL are also supported), and explains the differences between Java and .Net implementations. Download it from SourceForge.

DbFit 0.91 is available for download from SourceForge.

Most important changes in this release are:

• support for type normalisers in Java, which can transform content coming out of the database. That provides workarounds for JDBC driver inconsistencies and finally brings proper support for Oracle Timestamp, CLOB and REF cursor support in Java.
• New fixture table: Update. This type of table can be used to quickly script data updates. See acceptance tests for examples.
• support for BINARY and VARBINARY types for SQL Server 2005. These map to byte arrays. A utility formatter is also in the release, that allows you to specify byte arrays in hex format (0xABCD…). See the data types page in SQLServer acceptance tests for more information.

dbfit-complete-20071022.zip package contains all binaries (.NET and Java), examples and acceptance tests. Download that package if you want to start using DbFit. For those of you that already have an older binary release in use, I prepared smaller packages with DotNet and Java binaries.

A new binary release of DbFit is now on available. Grab it from SourceForge. This is a general catch-up and clean-up release, generally intended as a replacement for all the ad-hoc binary builds over the last few months.

New and noteworthy:

General:

• support for embedding DbFit tables into Java/.Net tests as a quick and efficient way to prepare the stage or verifying db results
• new fixtures: QueryStats and Clean for quick checking and cleaning up tables
• support for testing individual error codes with stored procs

Java:

• initial support for MySql 5
• support for Oracle stored functions, float and timestamps

DotNet

• support for BIT data type in SQLServer 2005
• support for Oracle Float data type

dbfit-complete-20070904.zip package contains all binaries (.NET and Java), examples and acceptance tests. Download that package if you want to start using DbFit. For those of you that already have an older binary release in use, I prepared smaller packages with DotNet and Java binaries.