Gojko Adzic

As always, it was a real pleasure to talk at Skills Matter yesterday. Thanks to everyone who attended the talk. There was quite an interest in this talk, and we might do a re-run for the people who could not make it this time. If you’d like to attend a re-run of the talk soon, drop an e-mail to the organisers and I’ll be happy to do it if there is enough interest.

Here are the slides from the talk. The video should be online at skillsmatter.com soon as well (subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified about that).

These are the links that I mentioned in the talk:

• Spring/Hibernate rollback example
• DbFit project pages on FitNesse.info

You might also be interested in checking out Scott Ambler’s agiledata.org site.

I’m doing a talk on effective test driven database development this Thursday in London (near Farringdon station, stating at 18:30). I’ll talk about unit testing stored procedures, test data management and best practices for java/.net integration testing that involves a database. In the talk I’ll also give a technical demo of my DbFit database unit testing library that provides DB management/unit testing capabilities to FIT/FitNesse.

The event will be organised by Skills Matter, and it is free but registration is required. For more info, see:

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/open-source-dot-net/effective-test-driven-database-development

See you on Thursday!

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Marisa Seal and I will jointly be presenting a session on Effective Test Driven Database Development at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Our session is scheduled for the afternoon on August 7th.

We’ll talk about the reasons why TDD is not as common in the database world as it is in Object languages, and present solutions and best practices for test-driven database development. We look at database testing from two aspects: unit-testing in the database (stored procedures, views) and integration testing from the OO service/web layer down to the database. We’ll also talk about DbFit and how that tool helps us build better database applications and integrate better with the databases.

For an early preview of the talk, come to Skills Matter in London on June 26th. I’ll be doing one of those free evening talks focused on a lot of the same topics as the Agile2008 talk.

I am pleased to finally announce version 1.0 of DbFit. DbFit is an extension to FIT/FitNesse that makes test-driven database development easy. Version 1.0 (2008-03-10) is a major cleanup release, finally bringing proper documentation for the library as well. Grab it from SourceForge.
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I’m preparing for release 1.0 of DbFit — one of the new things will be support for In/Out parameters. A pre-release with this functionality is now available for testing.
- To use In/Out parameters, just define two columns for the same parameter. The one for OUT direction should have a question mark
- Order of parameters in the table is no longer important (it was in Java), so you should be able to put parameters in FitNesse pages in a different order then those in the database.

Here is an example:

|Execute procedure|MultiplyIO|
|factor|val|val?|
|10|5|50|
|2|8|16|

Introducing IN/OUT parameters required a huge change in the underlying parameter processing, please help by testing a pre-release and verifying that your old tests work with the new system as well.

SQL Server turned out to be especially tricky because there is no explicit IN/OUT flag on stored procedure parameters, and .NET driver does not expect all outputs to be simply declared as InputOutput, so there is an ugly workaround in the code to check whether an output parameter is also used for input. I do not expect any problems with this, but it’s best to double-check.

Get the binary builds for .NET and Java from SourceForge.