Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning PostgreSQL
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. Testing

Software testing is the process of analyzing program components, programs, and systems with the intention of finding errors in them, and for determining or checking their technical limits and requirements.

The database is a specific system that requires special approaches for testing. This is because the behavior of database software components (views, stored procedures, or functions) depends not only on their code but also on the data; in many cases, it is not possible to just repeat the same function calls to get the same results.

That's why one should use specific techniques for testing database modules. PostgreSQL provides some features for helping developers and testers to do that.

In software architecture, the database usually lies at the lowest level. Business software processes the data, and the data is modeled and stored in the database. This is the reason why, in most cases, changes in the database schema affect many other software components.

This topic is closely...