Re: Cleanup isolation specs from unused steps

On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 12:16 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

> On 2019-Aug-21, Melanie Plageman wrote:
>
> > In Greenplum, we mainly add new tests to a separate isolation
> > framework (called isolation2) which uses a completely different
> > syntax. It doesn't use isolationtester at all. So, I haven't had a use
> > case to add long options to isolationtester yet :)
>
> Is that other framework somehow more capable?
>

So, there is some historical context as to why it is a separate test suite.
And some of the differences are specific to Greenplum -- e.g. needing to
connect
to a specific database in "utility mode" to do something.

However, the other differences are actually pretty handy and would be
applicable
to upstream as well.
We use a different syntax than the isolation framework and have some nice
features. Most notably, explicit control over blocking.

The syntax for what would be a "step" in isolation is like this:

[<#>[flag]:] <sql> | ! <shell scripts or command>

where # is the session number and flags include the following:

&: expect blocking behavior
>: running in background without blocking
<: join an existing session
q: quit the given session

See the script [1] for parsing the test cases for more details on the
syntax and
capabilities (it is in Python).

[1]
https://github.com/greenplum-db/gpdb/blob/master/src/test/isolation2/sql_isolation_testcase.py

--
Melanie Plageman