Question

SQL Developer supports unit testing of DML but I’ve not found a way to create unit tests for DDL. What would be a good approach to this problem? The schema I’m starting with is small, less than a dozen tables with larger projects on the horizon. Google isn’t returning much to the application of unit tests to DDL. Any ideas on an approach to testing DDL or other tools that exist for unit testing DDL?

Answer 1

What do you want to test about DDL? Either the table is created as defined or it is not.

What you could do is write a series of tests that queries the Data Dictionary to ensure the tables are present, have the columns with the sizes and datatype you want etc. This would be more of a schema verification script than unit tests however, and I am not sure how valuable it would be.

If you maintain a schema build script (or a series of migrations to add new objects to add objects to your schema), then if it applies without errors you know the schema has been created as it was defined.

Then if you have stored procedures, some of them will fail to compile if the schema is not 100% correct. Getting the procedures in cleanly would be another verification step for the schema.

Finally, the unit tests that you write to test the DML and stored procedures will verify that the correct data goes into the correct tables.

You might want some tests to ensure that a table can only accept certain values or columns can be unique etc (ie test the constraints are correct) but that would be down to standard unit tests too.

I am a big believer in writing unit tests for DB code, but I don’t like SQL Developers GUI approach of doing it. Right now I am writing tests for an application, but I am coding the tests in Ruby and it seems to be working well. It will also be easily built into our build and automated test process.

Another alternative is UT_PLSQL which I have used before, however simply due to the nature of PLSQL is makes the tests very verbose, which is why I decided to use Ruby for my current project.