The topic of a cascade delete came up on a project the other day and I was surprised to find one of the project members wasn’t familiar with the term or the concept. I thought I would share a short lesson and reflect on testing associated with cascade deletes.

A cascade delete is when an on object is deleted in an application and on the backend in a relational database, the delete cascades through the associated tables in the database removing associated data. (And hopefully both removing the appropriate information and leaving the other data.) The concept isn’t difficult to imagine although there are ripples of what takes place, what can go wrong, what could be tested, and how a failed delete can be found.

Searching. I’m currently testing a product that has a search feature. I’ve tested search functionality before but not a multilingual search engine that utilizes two different search engines based on the language selected. Nor have I previously worked with a search engine that uses stemming and stop words.

I almost didn’t want to write about this – figured I would wait until I resolved my challenges before writing about it – but it occurred to me why? It’s not as though in software testing I haven’t learned that first understanding the complexities of a problem is an essential starting point.

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) is making its conference proceedings from 1997 through 2005 available to the public. I believe that CMG holds the best practical conference in performance analysis, capacity planning, and related areas. In addition to the areas listed below, I'd definitely add performance testing. Here is the official mail CMG sent:

Often the first request I make when starting work on a new application, is to request the database schema. I thought (somehow) that this was a fairly typical tester’s first step but recently working with other testers I came to realize this might not be the case.

I thought I would quickly outline some of the things I learn from reading a database schema from a tester’s perspective.

This year performance (load, stress) testing will be a focus track at the CMG 2007 conference. It is the best conference, by my opinion, about performance-related topics. Below is the official text:

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for the 33rd International Conference to be held in San Diego, California, December 2nd through 7th, 2007. The 2007 CMG conference will cover load and stress testing, benchmarking, performance optimization, software performance engineering, resource management, capacity analysis, simulation and analytic modeling, and cost management with special emphasis on Virtualization, System Oriented Architecture (SOA), IT Service Management and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and the technology implications of globalization.

connectionstrings.com

If you didn't know about connectionstrings.com, you need to know about connectionstrings.com. Formats for every connection string under the sun apparently...

Using Multithreading and ADODB in Ruby

Ruby Scripting Language is emerging as a tester’s language for test automation. Ruby is a very feature reach and powerful language. We had a situation where we need to connect to different databases and fire a SELECT query at same point of time. I tried this various other alternatives, but no results.

Then I saw multithreading support in Ruby and implemented following code using it. While doing this I wanted to access databases using ADO and I could not found help on how to use ADO in Ruby, after trial and error I got the following code working. I am sharing this code so others can use this as a reference for using ADO in Ruby.

Java library to speed up the running of automated tests for projects that use toplink to access databases. It allows you to run the application in memory, rather than against a database.