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Category: Testing

Testing a SQL Server Operation with a Container

Published 2025-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret performs a test:

Today, my colleague wanted to quickly test out some dbatools commands to install the Ola Hallengren maintenance solution. They had a local instance of SQL installed, but it already had the maintenance jobs running, so it wasn’t a fresh, out of the box instance.

So let’s spin a SQL Server instance in seconds to test against! (Ok it’s seconds if you have the pre-requisites installed, but I’ll get you setup in a few minutes if not)!

Click through for a primer on using SQL Server in a container.

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Streaming Data to Azure Event Hub via Mockaroo and Kafka API

Published 2025-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jasleen Kaur Wahi generates some data:

In a recent project, I faced the need to generate randomized data for transmission to the Azure Event Hub. This hub is a key component of Microsoft Azure, used for real-time data ingestion and processing.

First, let’s take look at how I created this random data. I wanted to come up with a way to make data that looks like what we see in the real world, but without using any real information from users. This made-up data was really important for a bunch of things, like checking if our software works well.

Read on to see how Mockaroo works and the end result. Creating tests for streaming services like Event Hubs is a challenge, so this is an interesting approach to the task.

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Automating tSQLt Test Execution via Azure DevOps Pipeline

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt automates some tests:

Before we dive into “how to automate”, I would like to explain why bothering about Unit Test Automation. Unit Tests in general are a good practice to identify potential issues with new source code upfront. Therefore, executing Unit Tests is a good idea. By automating Unit Tests, developers can be sure that Unit Tests will be executed for every single deployment that happens.

In the upcoming step-by-step guide, Unit Test automation will be implemented in a YAML pipeline. The pipelines I’m using are very simplified in comparison with many other pipelines I have seen in the past.

Read on for the process.

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API Testing with pytest

Published 2024-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Xuan Nguyen Truong writes some tests:

API testing is an essential aspect of software development, ensuring that your application’s endpoints are functioning correctly and reliably. In this guide, we’ll introduce you to implement API testing in Python with Pytest and the Requests library.

I’m a big fan of pytest, as it makes testing in Python so much easier. There’s not a lot of ceremony involved in writing tests and it’s easy to see what’s failing during tests.

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The Cost of Free Testing Tools

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Lauren Harold reminds us that time has value and opportunity cost exists:

Open source frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright are the first stop for most startups when they automate their end-to-end tests. This process generally happens early, according to our research, with 69% of software teams with just 6-10 developers automating their testing.

But make no mistake. We recently surveyed developers and engineering leaders from around the globe to understand how current practices impact software velocity. One thing that immediately became apparent was that open source testing frameworks are “free,” but their costs snowball once you start adding testing infrastructure, plugins, and test management software.

The proposed solution in the article is no-code end-to-end testing, though that often ends up being brittle like other end-to-end testing solutions, and a huge challenge for complicated flows.

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Finding a Good Cost Threshold for Parallelism

Published 2024-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover goes on a quest:

Given modern hardware, you might hear that the default setting of 5 for the Cost Threshold for Parallelism (CTFP) is far too low. However, people are left with a decision: Should they change it or leave it alone? If I change it and the performance gets worse, I’ll be left with egg on my face. What exactly is the benefit of increasing it, especially for smaller-cost queries?

Read on to learn more about what Cost Threshold for Parallelism is, how you can set it, and a simple example of how the setting can affect you. Jared also has some links to great resources that I highly recommend you check out.

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Testing Kafka Messages with RecordCaptor

Published 2024-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Anton Belyaev shows off an open-source utility:

Let’s take a Telegram bot that forwards requests to the OpenAI API and returns the result to the user as an example. If the request to OpenAI violates the system’s security rules, the client will be notified. Additionally, a message will be sent to Kafka for the behavioral control system so that the manager can contact the user, explain that their request was too sensitive even for our bot, and ask them to review their preferences.

The interaction contracts with services are described in a simplified manner to emphasize the core logic. Below is a sequence diagram demonstrating the application’s architecture. I understand that the design may raise questions from a system architecture perspective, but please approach it with understanding — the main goal here is to demonstrate the approach to writing tests.

Read on to see how it all works, as well as links to Anton’s GitHub repo for testing in Kafka.

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Building a Test Data Generator for PostgreSQL

Published 2024-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen builds some data:

I recently had a project where I needed quickly to generate some realistic looking test data to PostgreSQL database. While I often like to go for ready-made solutions, this felt like a good opportunity to stretch my coding muscles and develop it myself. Moreover, this seemed like a fun puzzle to solve, and I could probably use the same solution later on elsewhere.

Click through for a description of the generator, as well as a link to Mika’s GitHub repo. Taking a quick peek at it, it does appear that you could probably use this for other data platforms like SQL Server with very limited modification.

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