Chapter 12. Testing

Software testing is the process of analyzing program components, programs, and systems with the intention of finding errors in them, and for determining or checking their technical limits and requirements.

The database is a specific system that requires special approaches for testing. This is because the behavior of database software components (views, stored procedures, or functions) depends not only on their code but also on the data; in many cases, it is not possible to just repeat the same function calls to get the same results.

That's why one should use specific techniques for testing database modules. PostgreSQL provides some features for helping developers and testers to do that.

In software architecture, the database usually lies at the lowest level. Business software processes the data, and the data is modeled and stored in the database. This is the reason why, in most cases, changes in the database schema affect many other software components.

This topic is closely...