Has anyone had any success in unit testing SQL stored procedures?

Question

We’ve found that the unit tests we’ve written for our C#/C++ code have really paid off. But we still have thousands of lines of business logic in stored procedures, which o

Answer 1

The problem with unit testing any kind of data-related programming is that you have to have a reliable set of test data to start with. A lot also depends on the complexity of the stored proc and what it does. It would be very hard to automate unit testing for a very complex procedure that modified many tables.

Some of the other posters have noted some simple ways to automate manually testing them, and also some tools you can use with SQL Server. On the Oracle side, PL/SQL guru Steven Feuerstein worked on a free unit testing tool for PL/SQL stored procedures called utPLSQL.

However, he dropped that effort and then went commercial with Quest's Code Tester for PL/SQL. Quest offers a free downloadable trial version. I'm on the verge of trying it out; my understanding is that it is good at taking care of the overhead in setting up a testing framework so that you can focus on just the tests themselves, and it keeps the tests so you can reuse them in regression testing, one of the great benefits of test-driven-development. In addition, it is supposed to be good at more than just checking an output variable and does have provision for validating data changes, but I still have to take a closer look myself. I thought this info might be of value for Oracle users.