Winter is coming and the 7th season of Game of Thrones now just a memory. While I do love watching TV series it was not them that dragged me away from my blog.
For last 18 months or so, I was heavily involved in design and development of new version of utPLSQL v3. After a year of development, we've published utPLSQL version 3.0.0 in May 2017 and now we are at version 3.0.3.
Last two months I was blogging quite a lot about UTPLSQL vs ruby-plsql.
There are lots of aspects that I did not manage to cover so far. I've had a ambitious plan to go through all of the details and dig into the darkest corners to show all the differences. Time is however one thing I'm really short on recently, so instead of going into all the details as planned I've decided to give a high level overview of main differences between UTPLSQL and ruby-plsql.
This will be a summary of the series for now, as I feel like moving into other topics. I might get back to it later if I find good reasons for doing so.
I recently use utPLSQL in my daily work as a testing framework and I've noticed that the framework is doing quite bad job on exception handling on the tested code. I'll try to demonstrate it with a simple/yet realistic scenario.
I've finished my previous post a bit too soon and was not precise on the ruby-plsql unite test results analysis.
I've decided to dig a bit deeper to validate that ruby-plsql (RSpec) actually support datatype mismatch exceptions where utPLSQL unit testing fails due to oracle implicit datatype conversion.
This post is a continuation of the utPLSQL vs. ruby-plsql series, you might want to have a look at my previous post for introduction and some basics.
In my previous posts I did some writngs on UTPLSQL and ruby-plsql. For long time, while developing Oracle code I was using ruby-plsql to do test driven development for SQL and PL/SQL. I used to frequently forget how to use some of the functionalities of ruby-plsql, specially after having a longer break and so each time I was referring the Unit Tests supplied for the ruby-plsql library as a reference. They are really nicely documenting how things work and how can they be used. It usually took me few minutes to find the thing I needed.
In my previous posts I have described some differences between utPLSQL and ruby-plsql. This time I want to focus on automating the test execution with each of those frameworks using Jenkins Continuous Integration.
I have finished my previous post with comparison of basic reporting capabilities build into UTPLSQL and ruby-plsql frameworks for Oracle unit testing.
In my previous post I have described the conceptual differences between UTPLSQL and ruby-plsql frameworks for unit testing of Oracle database code. I have used a message_api package and unit tests for that API using both frameworks as an example. In this post I will focus on getting the tests to run and the feedback that we can we get from the tests using both frameworks.
Unit Testing is around for quite a while. Since it started to become more and more popular, quite a few tools became available for Oracle database to allow unit testing of the database. There are the UI based tools like Quest Code Tester (now Dell Code Tester for Oracle), Oracle SQL Developer unit testing. There is DBFit by Goyko Adzic for regression and functional testing of databases (including but not limited to Oracle), there are probably many more of that kind, that I'm not aware of. There are also pure programming language based frameworks like UTPLSQL and ruby-plsql. There are probably (and hopefully) many more of that sort that I'm not aware of. Unit tests are meant to be created and maintained by software developers and are to help developers keep their code clean and valid throughout entire project life cycle. UI based frameworks for unit testing are putting a high abstraction and tight facade between the code and the developer. Those frameworks tend to limit the richness and variety of possible implementations for a test case and therefore are not suited for software developers. The time and cost of development and maintenance for UI-based unit tests is usually way beyond the benefits. Variety of program units that are possible to develop is infinite and the only limitations to what the unit can do are the programming language boundaries and developers creativity. For this reason itself, it is best to use a programming language of similar or higher flexibility to describe and test the behaviour for a unit. In this series of article I will focus on two programming language-based unit testing frameworks for Oralce, that I got familiar with and had opportunity to use.