Testing without a test database

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm working on a very large, very complex legacy database (Oracle, > 4GB of text data in 1000s of tables). For this situation, dropping tables and populating them from fixtures just isn't feasible: I can't load 500MB of data every time I want to test my app. I also can't muck with the dev database, since it is used by other developers for other projects, and only gets cloned from the production DB once every few months. Is there a way to short circuit the typical testing methods to have them open a transaction, load test-specific fixtures, run the tests and then close the transaction without dropping the tables first?

I've been googling like mad and I can't seem to find anything, but I'm sure that I'm not the first person to run into this problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

2

I can't give you specific code examples because I am just getting into testing myself so I just don't know enough. Right now I am working through "The Rails Way" (http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison- Wesley-Professional-Ruby/dp/0321445619). It has some great stuff on mocks and stubs that allows you to do a lot of testing without hitting the database.

I hope that helps.