Gojko Adzic

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.
Continue Reading »

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.

Great news - SQLServer 2000 is now supported in DbFit. The only limitation, compared to Sql Server 2005, is that tables and procedures must be fully qualified (defined as schema.name), if there is an object of the same name in the current user’s schema and in dbo. The next official release will include sql server support — until then, you can download the binaries from Sourceforge: dbfit-dotnet-20080107.zip

the complete package, with acceptance tests, can also be downloaded from here: dbfit-complete-20080107.zip

For sqlserver 2000, use dbfit.SqlServer2000Test instead of dbfit.SqlServerTest.

Many thanks to Oscar Centeno for his help on implementing and testing support for Sql Server

DbFit 0.93 has just been released. Pick it up from SourceForge.

New and noteworthy

• Storing query results into fixture symbols
• Comparing queries stored into symbols
• SQL Server support for GUID and SQL_Variant types (variant is treated like a string)
• .NET version updated to use FitNesse.Net 1.3
• Loading connection settings from a text file on server

Continue Reading »