Tag: tsqlt

Two in Two Days

It’s a busy week for me. I’ve got quite a few articles to review, feedback to write for Stairway Series authors, review and changes of some PowerPoint decks for later this month, and two User Group presentations.

This is on top of a busy first week of school in the household. I feel like I’m playing catch up all week.

Boulder

I’ll be at the Boulder SQL Server User Group tonight. My presentation will be on Unstructured Data in SQL Server, looking at Filestream and Filetable and how they can be setup and used.

Fortunately I’ve done this before, and a little practice this week was enough to get me ready.

Hopefully I’ll see a few of you there as I haven’t been to Boulder in over a year.

Denver SQL

The Denver SQL Server User Group usually asks me do a presentation or two each year and this time I have a new one. They get to be my guinea pigs for the first delivery of this talk.

Get Testing with tsqlt, a preview of a talk I’ll be doing at SQL in the City, is on the agenda. I’ve been going over this one a few times this week, so hopefully it goes smoothly.

August 20, 2014
Updating tsqlt

I was looking to write a new test with the tsqlt framework recently. I wanted to isolate a stored procedure’s logic and planned on using the FakeFunction procedure available in tsqlt.

I wrote my test, using a template from the Pluralsight course on tsqlt and the documentation. I tried to execute the test and get a “tsqlt.fakefunction does not exist” error.

I was slightly confused at first, but checking my list of functions and stored procedures showed that I didn’t have the FakeFunction procedure available. It’s a relatively recent addition to tsqlt, so I needed and update.

After downloading the framework (a zip file), I opened it up to find this:

A number of files there, but the tsqlt.class.sql is the important one. I double clicked it from the zip and it opened in SSMS.

It’s a standard T-SQL script, albeit a long one. I executed it and it ran fine. My framework was updated to the latest version and I now had the function I needed.

Of course, I used my test to ensure this worked as expected and I was pleased to see it work well.

August 20, 2014
A Little Learning with Pluralsight

I’ve been working on a new presentation on testing using the tSQLt framework and was curious how other people are using the framework. I read through the documentation and various articles on Simple Talk. I also went through the Google Group and StackOverflow tags for tSQLt, gathering lots of viewpoints on how the framework is used.

However I wanted more. I’ve tested T-SQL code before, but usually in the simplistic way that I see most SQL Server developers running tests. Contriving a bit of data, building a query that checks things, and moving on. I’ve never written formal SQL tests, and wanted to learn something.

I turned to my friend, Google, and was surprised to see a course on Pluralsight pop up. I didn’t think tSQLt was popular enough to build a course, but apparently it was, so I signed on and went through the course. It was interesting, and I got a nice set of hints on how Dave Green uses tSQLt and some ideas on how I could enhance my presentation.

Then I went looking for a few more courses. Since I was a bit laid up with my knee surgery, I was stuck in bed and rather than watch TV, I wandered around the Pluralsight site a bit. I was surprised to find a course on SQL Prompt and went through that, getting a few tips and tricks that I hadn’t used before. I also started a course on CTEs from Joe Sack, and I’ve learned a couple tricks in there.

Overall, I’m impressed with Pluralsight. I’ve had a subscription for some time as an MVP, but hadn’t accessed it. However I’ll be spending a few minutes here and there working my way through the offerings, trying to learn a bit more about SQL Server, as well as tackle some C# and security.

May 22, 2014

Test Coverage

I’ve never had to work full time in a QA group, but I have had to perform software testing of an application and it wasn’t fun. Even as I worked through the various features, looking for edge cases, common mistakes, etc., I realized that running tests was something that really required more discipline and process than I was giving it at the time. Too often I ‘d realize that my regressions weren’t 100% duplicates of previous executions because I’d allowed too much “human effort” into my process.

These days most testing of software is automated. I know QA groups still exist, and they need to handle some of the manual checks that are very hard to automate. However more and more testing is being pushed back onto developers to handle, with frameworks like NUnit and JUnit. In the database world, we haven’t done a great job of including testing into the code we write, but there’s a great testing framework we can use.

TSQLT is a framework written by Sebastian Meine and Dennis Lloyd and it’s free. It’s been developed to help you write tests that can exercise your T-SQL code to determine if it’s doing what you expect. I’ve used it a little, and while I see the potential, I also realize that this will take some practice to learn how to more easily write tests that can cover the various potential places where bugs can be introduced.

However, if you use version control, and you should, then you can easily spread the load of writing tests to all of your developers. Since the tests are stored procedures, they can be included in your VCS project and shared by all your developers. With a little effort from each member of your team, you might be surprised at the code coverage you can achieve with this framework.

Testing is important, as we see over and over again as software is released and doesn’t work as expected. I think much of that is our fault, as software developers, for not improving our testing skills and discipline.

Steve Jones

If you want more automated ways to easily share tests between developers and execute them, take a look at SQL Source Control and SQL Test from Red Gate Software.

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