September Meeting next week!

Where: FreeGeek http://www.freegeek.org
When: 7pm 17 Sept, 2009
Who: David Wheeler
What: Unit Test Your Database!

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Talk description:

Given that the database, as the canonical repository of data, is the
most important part of many applications, why is it that we don't
write database unit tests? This talk promotes the practice of
implementing tests to directly test the schema, storage, and
functionality of databases.

We're all used to unit testing our applications by now. The Extreme
and Agile programming movements have done a great deal to promote unit
testing, to the extent that many of us are now dependent on tests to
assure that our applications work reliably. But how often do we test
the database underlying our applications? Given that the database, as
the repository for all of the knowledge and data for an application,
just might be the single most important part of that application, the
time for standardized database unit testing has come.

This talk promotes the practice of writing and running unit tests that
directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of application
databases. Following a review of the available PostgreSQL unit testing
frameworks, we'll review examples of testing tables, views, columns,
constraints, indexes, triggers, and functions. The idea is to promote
complete test coverage every aspect of a database, independent of
application unit tests, to ensure reliably canonical data integrity.

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After David's talk, we'll head to the SE Lucky Lab to crash the PDX.pm
weekly hackathon.

See you there!

gabrielle