Since database unit tests are first-class test types in Team Test, you can take full advantage of the MSTest.exe command-line tool for running and automating the execution of your database unit tests. First you need to get yourself into a command...

Ed Burnette has a great post looking back on the successes of Erich Gamma. While I think of him most for his pivotal book on design patterns, he also made a large contribution with Kent Back on JUnit, one of the first real unit testing frameworks. The...

Several people have asked me about what the Inconclusive Test Condition is and why we add it by default to database unit tests. I thought I’d take a moment to address this here on the blog. If an Inconclusive Test Condition is added to a database...

One of the powerful features of Team Edition for Database Professionals is its ability to automatically generate a stub SQL test script for stored procedures, functions, and triggers. This feature allows you to right-click on an existing sproc,...

With Team Edition for Database Professionals, you can create database unit tests and debug the objects under tests. This is an important technique that is very useful for investigating failed database unit tests. An important thing to remember here...

Developer.com has a great article on Test Driven Development. This methodology is gaining momentum and is as important for database professionals to master as it is for application developers. http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3622546...

As you know, Team Edition for Database Professionals is part of the larger Visual Studio Team System. Much of the value of this toolset is only realized when you leverage the entire Team Suite. Some of the tighter integration you get when you use...

Team Edition for Database Professionals, combined with Team Test and Team Foundation Server, provides a facility for allowing you to enforce a team-wide policy requiring that a set of tests are run and pass before every check-in. This is a practice that...

Team Edition for Database Professionals is targeted primarily at managing iterative changes for preproduction database development. The primary use case for deploying rename refactorings is to your local sandbox server. The cleanest way to setup...

For many database professionals, unit testing is a foreign concept. Many of you may have never heard of the xUnit family of test frameworks, including modern-day frameworks like NUnit and JUnit. I thought I would link you back to an early article...

One important consideration in database unit testing is managing the database state. This aspect of database unit testing makes it more difficult than its app-tier counterpart. However, it’s fundamental to what database unit testing is, as a database...

Another great question J There are several ways to answer that. In the broadest sense, the database professional is any professional who directly interacts with the database, ranging from the data architect, to the database developer, to the database...

One of the most important aspects of database unit testing is verification. The application unit testing answer to verification is assertions. Most unit testing frameworks come with a collection of assertions that you can use to verify various conditions...

Since database unit testing is a fairly new concept, I thought I’d give you a sense for some types of unit tests you can write for your database. Feature Tests The first and likely most prevalent type of database unit test is a feature test....

I wanted to show you how easy it is to create your first database unit test using Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. So we’ll walk through exactly how to create a unit test for the CustOrderHist stored procedure in the Northwind database...

The latest Community Technology Preview (CTP4) of Team Edition for Database Professionals is now available! You'll see introduced a brand new view of your database projects, as well as bug fixes throughout the product. And as always, keep the feedback...

I wanted to take a moment to point people back to an early article that Martin Fowler & Pramod Sadalage put together describing the concept of evolutionary database design and some early thoughts on how to make this happen in 2003: http://martinfowler...

Cameron Skinner, Product Unit Manager (the guy who runs the product group), has a great post with a walkthrough of the test data generation tool. You can find it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2006/06/30/652407.aspx He shows you exactly...

Anytime you are doing any sort of serious database development, you’ll need realistic test data to verify your system. There are several commonly used approaches to test data generation: § Use production data for testing purposes . Typically you...

In case you have been living in your own little bubble and missed all the excitement around the new edition to Team System: Team Edition for Database Professionals, you should definitely check out Kimberly Tripp's overview of the buzz. She details a lot...

I wanted to send kudos over to Scott W. Ambler and Pramodkumar J. Sadalage for recently publishing a great book on the very topic of refactoring databases. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321293533...

Well, I’m glad you asked :) The best way to explain database refactoring is to offer two different perspectives, depending on the background you are coming from. I offer a view on database refactoring both from the perspective of a seasoned application...

Unit Testing, while a well understood technique in the application development world, is not nearly as prevalent in the data community. Therefore, before jumping into how exactly you would utilize this technique and our toolset around it, you must understand...

A great way to learn more about the product, hear what other users have to say about it, and get your questions answered by the product team is by checking out the MSDN Forums dedicated to this product. You'll find that here: http://forums.microsoft...

Beyond myself, there are quite a few other bloggers from the product team. I thought I would take this moment to quickly introduce each of these individuals and point you toward their blog: Cameron Skinner , Product Unit Manager Matt Nunn...