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Category: Testing

Running dbachecks In Parallel

Published 2018-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Caludio Silva shows how you can run multiple instances of dbachecks concurrently:

Imagine that I want to check for databases in Full Recovery Model on the production environment and I want to start (in parallel) a new check for the development environment where I want to check for Simple Recovery Model if this setting is not changed in the correct time frame, we can end checking for Full Recovery Model on the development environment where we want the Simple Recovery Model.

The first time I tried to run tests for some environments in parallel, that had the need to change some configs, I didn’t realise about this detail so I ended up with much more failed tests than the expected! The bell rang when the majority of the failed tests were from a specific test…the one I had changed the value.

Read the whole thing before you start running Task.Parallel or even running multiple copies of dbachecks in separate Powershell windows.

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Verifying SSIS Database Connections With ssisUnit

Published 2018-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Bartosz Ratajczyk shows how to test project-level connections in SQL Server Integration Services with ssisUnit:

Previously we successfully prepared tests for variables and parameters using VariableCommandand and ParameterCommand. Now it’s time to communicate with the database, and for that, I will use connection manager defined on the project level. I know from the ssisUnit tutorials it works perfect with package connection managers, so it’s time to verify it against the projects. I will test the package 10_ProjectCM.dtsx – it is just getting a single value from the table in a database and storing it in a variable. All the packages and unit tests are on my GitHub.

The package contains three SQL Tasks: the first just checks if we can communicate with the database using SELECT 1 statement, the second gets the information from the table, and the third repeats the second on the container level.

Click through for the tests.

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New dbachecks Checks

Published 2018-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell announces updates in the dbachecks Powershell package:

Today we updated the HADR tests to add the capability to test multiple availability groups and fix a couple of bugs

Once you have installed dbachecks you will need to set some configuration so that you can perform the tests. You can see all of the configuration items and their values using

Read on for more about these updates.

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Getting Started With ssisUnit

Published 2018-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Bartosz Ratajczyk builds a few SQL Server Integration Services unit tests with ssisUnit:

The result shows 1 test run, 1 test passed, 2 asserts run, 2 asserts passed.

Wait, what? We have prepared only one assert, why does it show two?

The second assert is: “Task Completed: Actual result (Success) was equal to the expected result (Success).“. Great. Where does it come from? Let’s find out.

This is a nice introduction to the topic; if you fuss about with SSIS packages, you should check this out.

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Excluding Checks With dbachecks

Published 2018-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley shows us how to set a config which lets us exclude particular checks when running dbachecks:

While tweaking my Invoke-DbcCheck  the list of  -ExcludeCheck checks keeps growing and growing.

Sure does make for a long command line to scroll thru.

Click through to see how to save these excluded checks in a configuration file.

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Unit Testing Spark Streaming DStreams

Published 2018-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Anuj Saxena shows how to create unit tests for DStreams in Spark Streaming:

The method ‘ testOperation ‘ takes the output of the operation performed on the ‘inputPair’ and check whether it is equal to the ‘outputPair’ and just like this, we can test our business logic.

This short snippet lets you test your business logic without forcing you to create even a Spark session. You can mock the whole streaming environment and test your business logic easily.

This was a simple example of unary operations on DStreams. Similarly, we can test binary operations and window operations on DStreams.

Click through for an example with code.

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Unit Testing Spark Streaming DStreams

Published 2017-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Anuj Saxena gives an example of using StreamingSuiteBase to build unit tests for DStreams in Spark Streaming:

So what’s the problem? How to execute streaming logic in a test environment.

We can write Integration test cases and provide the actual environment in the integration test. But for unit testing, we need a testing environment which should not depend on any external application.

Click through for the example.

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Policing Database Deployments

Published 2017-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele has a rather interesting library that he’s released to the general public:

The base return is the TSQLFragment object, which in turn has a Batches object, which in turn holds… well it can hold a lot of different things. When the text is parsed, it will determine what type of object to return based on the statement it determines it is. For example, if it’s an insert statement it will be a certain type of object with a given set of properties and methods, and if it’s, say, a create index statement you’ll get different properties, such as which table or view is getting the index along with the indexed columns and included columns. It really is interesting.

But interesting can a double-edged sword: since the statement object that gets returned can be different for each parsed piece of code, that means to set up any type of intelligence around the stuff we’re dealing with, we need to check for very specific objects.

Unfortunately, I never got past the first animated GIF, whose subtitle was wrong.  You, however, should read the whole thing.

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Looping Through Pester Tests

Published 2017-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows how to iterate through a collection of Pester tests:

The problem with  Test Cases is that we can only easily loop through one collection, but as Pester is just PowerShell we can simply use ForEach if we wanted to loop through multiple ones, like instances and then databases.

I like to use the ForEach method as it is slightly quicker than other methods. It will only work with PowerShell version 4 and above. Below that version you need to pipe the collection to For-EachObject.

Check it out for a good explanation of running groups of Powershell tests.

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