Testing

Timothy Smith

DevSecOps: Developing with Automated Security Testing

March 6, 2019 by

A key component of DevSecOps and identical to running unit tests to validate code after a build, running automated security testing after an application has been deployed (such as automated penetration tests) can provide us with a tool that identifies security risks. As we’ve seen recently, there’s been a growth of many companies experiencing information being compromised and with the development culture of “move fast and break things”, I expect this trend of successful attacks will continue. Before we look at our options for automating this testing, we want to be aware of its limits, evaluate the requirements, and consider common designs that are useful.

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Esat Erkec

SQL Unit Testing with SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools)

February 12, 2019 by

In this article, we will discuss the essentials of the SQL unit testing and then we will explore how to apply SQL unit testing methodology in Azure SQL Database with help of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). In particular, this article will focus about unit test theory in terms of SQL Server database development aspect and illustrate SQL unit testing with a detailed example.

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Brian Lockwood

Using production data for testing in a post GDPR world

January 15, 2018 by

To SQL Server DBAs who are the shepherds of data in organizations, key GDPR questions, in general, center around whether data will need to be treated differently, safeguarded more etc. and specifically, as it relates to allowing production data to be used in testing.

That will be the focus of this article as we’ll work our way through the details of this regulation as well as various authoritative articles on the subject, to address this key question. Then we’ll look to ways and means to potentially ameliorate our findings to provide alternatives and workarounds if possible.

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Samir Behara

Review of SQL Cop for SQL unit testing

September 29, 2017 by

SQL unit testing is rising in popularity amongst database developers. The importance of Code Quality in Software Development has increased over the period of time. Everyone wants to follow coding standards and write clean code. However, to timely deliver a product to Business we end up in violating design principles, writing fewer unit tests, increasing code complexity and breaching best practices. This increases the overall Technical Debt of the application and has the potential to halt future development work by creating unplanned work.

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Nemanja Popovic

SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Testing, processing and automation

January 31, 2017 by

Testing

Test databases should be processed with unit tests

In many shops code is unit tested at the point of commit. For databases, I prefer running all unit tests at once and in sequence against a QA database, vs development, as part of a Test step, in my continuous integration workflow pipeline. Yes, issues would be caught later than at check-in, but continuous integration largely solves this with frequent iterations, including at a commit itself. So the difference between on-check in, unit testing and unit testing a build created on-commit, is simply that the unit tests will be run against a fully re-constituted QA database, vs Development. The previous article in this series is SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Source control. Read more »
Daniel Calbimonte

How to generate random SQL Server test data using T-SQL

January 26, 2017 by

Introduction

In this article, we will talk about generating random values for testing purposes.

I once had a customer with software that worked fine in the demo with 30 rows, but after some months, the software had more than a million rows and it became very slow. The problem was not SQL Server, the problem was the application, which was not designed for tables with millions of rows. The customer sued to the software provider and lawyers were needed to create a resolution. If the provider had tested the software with millions of rows, this problem would have never happened.

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Régis Baccaro

Automating database tests with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

October 31, 2014 by

This is the third post in the series about database development and testing using SQL Server Data Tools and Team Foundation Server.

Post 1: Continuous Integration with SSDT and TFS

Post 2: Unit testing with SQL Server Data Tools

You can run test in Visual Studio to test the quality of your build. In VS 2012 and 2013 there are 5 kind of tests that are available for the user Read more »

Derik Hammer

Backup testing with PowerShell – Part 2: Reporting results

October 22, 2014 by

Now that Karla’s restore process is mature, it is time to pre-stage the means of reporting on these events. Two major actions have been taken for each database tested. First a restore operation occurred. The restore operation validates that the backup file is well formed and that there is nothing wrong with the data which would cause a failure. Next CheckTables was executed to thoroughly inspect for data corruption and any consistency errors. Each of these two actions will have their own methods of providing evidence of successful completion. Recall the requirements set by Karla, in part 1 of this series, for the reporting piece. Read more »

Derik Hammer

Backup testing with PowerShell – Part 1: The test

October 21, 2014 by

Karla is a production database administrator and she has a lot in common with you. Being responsible for database backups and recovery, she has implemented a well-structured automated backup system. Maybe she’s using Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution, custom T-SQL stored procedures, or a set of PowerShell scripts. She has heard the saying, “a DBA only needs one thing, either a backup or a resume, but never both,” and is confident that she won’t be dusting off the resume any time soon. Read more »