CODEWITHSUNDEEP
grailstestingtddintegration-testinggrails-2.0
Alexander Suraphel
Alexander Suraphel

Reputation: 10623

Is it a good Idea to drop the database after every integration test case?

We're using Grails as our web framework and we have integration tests that we want to have isolated. One idea that was brought up is to drop the database after every test case. What are alternative and more applicable ways to achieve test isolation.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1022

Answers (2)

piotrek
piotrek

Reputation: 14550

we were doing two things:

  1. rollback transaction. this deals with most of the problems (DML) but not all (for example sequences). also sometimes you need to commit a few transactions to make a proper tests. that's why we:
  2. reset the database. you can achieve it in many ways: use frameworks that cleans data (db-unit), do manual reverts of inserted data, drop db or, as we did, truncate all tables and run custom script (if you need to reset sequences or something else). it's much faster than dropping and recreating db. it worked really good

Upvotes: 2

Burt Beckwith
Burt Beckwith

Reputation: 75681

You probably don't need something that aggressive. Each integration test is run in a transaction that's rolled back at the end of the test, so you shouldn't see anything from previous tests. There are cases where you want to commit a transaction though, so you can disable the automatic transaction and rollback and manage things yourself. That will increase the likelihood of data pollution between tests but it's easy enough to fix.

Since the database is in-memory initially, it's relatively inexpensive to drop the whole database and re-create all of the tables and objects, but this will be significantly slower if you move to a "real" database, e.g. a local install of Postgres to ensure that tests are running as close to how the code will run in production as possible.

Upvotes: 1

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