How do I unit test persistence?

Question

As a novice in practicing test-driven development, I often end up in a quandary as to how to unit test persistence to a database.

I know that technically this would be an integration test (not a unit test), but I want to find out the best strategies for the following:

1. Testing queries.
2. Testing inserts. How do I know that the insert that has gone wrong if it fails? I can test it by inserting and then querying, but how can I know that the query wasn't wrong?
3. Testing updates and deletes -- same as testing inserts

What are the best practices for doing these?

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Regarding testing SQL: I am aware that this could be done, but if I use an O/R Mapper like NHibernate, it attaches some naming warts in the aliases used for the output queries, and as that is somewhat unpredictable I'm not sure I could test for that.

Should I just, abandon everything and simply trust NHibernate? I'm not sure that's prudent.

Answer 1

Look into DB Unit. It is a Java library, but there must be a C# equivalent. It lets you prepare the database with a set of data so that you know what is in the database, then you can interface with DB Unit to see what is in the database. It can run against many database systems, so you can use your actual database setup, or use something else, like HSQL in Java (a Java database implementation with an in memory option).

If you want to test that your code is using the database properly (which you most likely should be doing), then this is the way to go to isolate each test and ensure the database has expected data prepared.

Answer 2

As Mike Stone said, DbUnit is great for getting the database into a known state before running your tests. When your tests are finished, DbUnit can put the database back into the state it was in before you ran the tests.

DbUnit (Java)

DbUnit.NET