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Category: Testing

Testing Analysis Services Cubes

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard shows how to test Analysis Services cubes using a Visual Studio test project:

Unit testing in Visual Studio is actually not that hard and can save you a lot pain down the road. The testing framework in Visual Studio offers extensive ways of executing batches of tests. You can group tests by Class, Duration, Outcome, Trait or Project.

When you right-click a test, you get the option to select how you want the tests in the Test Explorer to be grouped.

If you have an Analysis Services cube, definitely read this—testing is a vital part of software development, and automating tests can save you significant time later.

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Tests Are Hard

Published 2016-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Cody Konior explains how testing is harder than it seems in the demos:

We should have 4 backup jobs

Definitely 4, not 3, and 5 is right out.

Unless of course someone builds a 500GB database with SQL CLR UDTs which slow down DBCC to a crawl, so you move the backups and maintenance for that database into their own jobs or steps with different flags, and possibly start staggering some stuff so it finishes on the weekend without dripping into Monday.

Then you’ve got more. But just kind of sweep them under the carpet. We have file system backup checks so that covers most of it…

These are just administrative test examples; when you have to start testing queries and procedures, it’s a whole new level of fun, as it feels like you’re building a castle on sand.

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Unit Testing With SSDT And tSQLt

Published 2016-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke looks at adding tSQLt to an existing SQL Server Data Tools database project:

Whilst I won’t be showing code in this, there is a companion sample database project. This is on GitHub and each key stage is shown by a branch of work. This means you can jump in at most stages and work from there. If you need some git advice, check out my quick git in 5 presentation.

The core DB is a super hero themed database.

Database unit testing involves a lot of compromises (because most of what we care about as database professionals tends to be integration tests rather than unit tests), but having imperfect tests generally beats having no tests, so check this out.

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Bugfixes To SQLCover

Published 2016-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott notes that there is a new version of SQLCover out:

There have been a couple of fixes in SQLCover this week, kindly submitted by John Mclusky (https://github.com/jmclusky):

Code coverage not reported correctly for CTEs at the end of a stored procedure if the ‘with’ is immediately preceded with a semicolon

and

DeclareTableVariableStatement statements cannot be covered, so report falsely as missing coverage

Go check out SQLCover.

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Using Pester To Validate Script Installations

Published 2016-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell wants to use Pester to guarantee that he has Ola’s maintenance scripts installed on a server:

First I thought about what I would look for in SSMS when I had installed the maintenance solution and made a list of the things that I would check which looked something like this. This would be the checklist you would create (or have already created) for yourself or a junior following this install. This is how easy you can turn that checklist into a Pester Test and remove the human element and open your install for automated testing

  • SQL Server Agent is running – Otherwise the jobs won’t run🙂

  • We should have 4 backup jobs with a name of

  • DatabaseBackup – SYSTEM_DATABASES – FULL

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – FULL

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – DIFF

  • DatabaseBackup – USER_DATABASES – LOG

  • We should have Integrity Check and Index Optimisation Jobs

  • We should have the clean up jobs

  • All jobs should be scheduled

  • All jobs should be enabled

  • The jobs should have succeeded

There’s a very nice script and walkthrough of the process if you click through.

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Automating Data Warehouse Testing

Published 2016-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Koos van Strien discusses warehouse testing:

Case: we’ve integrated two sources of customers. We want to add a third source.

Q: How do we at the same time know that our current integration and solutions will continue to work while at the same time integrating the new sources?

A: Test it.

Q: How do we get faster deployments and more stability?

A: Automate the tests, so they can run continuously.

This is an interesting concept; do read the whole thing.

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Understand Your Testing Utilities

Published 2016-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee shows an issue with using iperf for load testing:

The load test utility had maxed out the compute resource that it had available, due to internal limitations within iperf itself.  It’s a shame that this utility is not multi-threaded, because I think we could have a much greater result of improvement on this system.

Monitor the utilities that you’re using to do load testing, because limitations like this might skew your results!

Everything eventually hits a bottleneck.  In David’s case, the bottleneck was in the testing tool itself.

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tSQLt Visual Studio Test Adapter

Published 2016-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has a Visual Studio extension to run tSQLt tests:

What is this?

This lets you use Visual Studio to run tSQLt tests easily. Visual Studio has a built in framework for finding and executing tests so that if you have tSQLt tests in an SSDT project for example, although this just requires you have the .sql files in source control and does not require ssdt – you can easily see and execute your tests via the Visual Studio Test Explorer window. It is also available for use in your favorite build server via the vstest.console.exe tool or if you have vsts then you can use the default test task.

Combined with Visual Studio database tests for integration testing, this gives you a pretty fair start on database testing technology.

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Load Testing Analysis Services

Published 2016-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Anton provides Powershell code to load test Analysis Services cubes:

One of the more time consuming pieces in this process is step 4 – setting up a solution that can generate a concurrent query workload. Bob Duffy (b | t) has written blogs and delivered presentations on the topic of Analysis Services load testing. However, when it comes to tooling (unless something changed recently) I believe he’s still using a custom .NET Visual Studio Test solution for the test harness. And unless you know .NET, you’re going to have a pretty difficult time getting setup… which is why I was so happy when, earlier this year, Chris Schmidt (b | t) wrote a post over on MSDN demonstrating a method for load testing an Analysis Services database using PowerShell.

This weekend I finally had some time to expand upon Chris’ code sample and add several new features… e.g. parameters (target server/database, level of concurrency, queries per batch, etc) and the ability to retrieve MDX (or DAX) queries from a SQL table. In my experience, it’s quite a bit easier to generate a table of MDX/DAX queries rather than a bunch of txt files with a query in each file.

My first thought was “Well, that doesn’t seem too complicated.”  Which means that Bill did a great job.

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Unit Testing Of Spark Streaming

Published 2016-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Felipe Fernandez shows how to unit test Spark Streaming:

Controlling the lifecycle of Spark can be cumbersome and tedious. Fortunately, Spark Testing Baseproject offers us Scala Traits that handle those low-level details for us. Streaming has an extra bit of complexity as we need to produce data for ingestion in a timely way. At the same time, Spark internal clock needs to tick in a controlled way if we want to test timed operations as sliding windows.

This is part one of a series.  I’m interesting in seeing where this goes.

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