Testing Relational Database Schemas with Alternative Instance Analysis.
Maria Cláudia Figueiredo Pereira Emer, Sílvia Regina Vergílio, Mário Jino · Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2008
Databases are employed to store a great amount of data extremely important for business operations. Database test evaluates if a database meets its requirements. In this context, to test the database schemas is a fundamental activity to increase the confidence on the integrity of the data being manipulated by the database applications. There are few works that address this subject. Approaches to test database schemas can help to find faults related to the incorrect or absent definitions of constraints in the data and can contribute to avoid failures in the applications. With this in mind, in this paper we present a fault-based testing approach for testing database schemas and introduce testing criteria based on the classification of the most common types of fault in database schemas. The approach proposes the use of database instances and queries to test the schemas. The instances are generated according to patterns defined for each fault class and represent possible faults. Preliminary results are discussed.