Re: Regression Testing

"Gary McLane" <mclan001_at_mc.duke.edu> wrote in message news:c8gh6g$emi$1_at_gargoyle.oit.duke.edu...
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for replying to my post.
>
> What you say below is obvious, but I need to determine if a tool actually
> exists. You never know; if someone builds one, others may buy it. I
realize
> that such a tool probably does not exist (at least not outside of Oracle),
> but my job is to find out if one does exist.
>
> Gary McLane
>
> "G Dahler" <yellow-shark_at_spamex.com> wrote in message
> news:BTOqc.65461$325.1272117_at_news20.bellglobal.com...
> >
> > "Gary McLane" <mclan001_at_mc.duke.edu> a écrit dans le message de
> > news:c8g5mo$de7$1_at_gargoyle.oit.duke.edu...
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Is anyone aware of regression testing tools for the Oracle RDBMS?
> > >
> > > My understanding is that Oracle does regression testing before
releasing
> a
> > > major upgrade to the RDBMS, but not for patch releases.
> > >
> > > I am interested in an inexpensive software package that I can use for
> > > regression testing Oracle patch releases.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> >
> > Regression testing database software must be a HUGE feat, there must be
> > thousands of tests to do. Even if you had the tools to do so in your
> > enviroment, you would have to know actually which test to perform.
> >
> > Regression testing is sometimes done at a very detailed level (Eg:
> physical
> > structure of the written data, etc...)
> >
> > I presume you would like to be confident that your code will run well
> before
> > appying a patch to your prod environment ?
> >
> > In this case, what you have to do is install the patch in a TEST
> environment
> > (You do it, don't you ?) and test your code there before approving the
> move
> > in production, that's basic deployment methodology.
> >
> > If you do that and are very paranoid, you can also wait for others to
> "test"
> > a new patch before appying it and see what happens to other customers.
If
> > you don't have time to wait, I dont see where you'll find the time to
> > "regression test" oracle either.
> >
> > And remember, in the oracle user agreement, it is written that oracle is
> not
> > designed to run a nuclear facility :-)
> >
> >
> >
>
>

Gary,
There are many QA tools that will do regression tests. (Mercury, etc) The problem is designing all the regression tests. Oracle uses a grid environment to do its internal QA testing and so it may in fact do more regression tests now. I doubt there is anyone who sells the regression tests, just the tools.

What we do is have development, test, and production environments. For any patch we put it into Development first, do a complete set of application regression tests. Then we do the same in the test environment. Finally, after much testing we put it into production. That is a more reasonable approach than trying to do regression tests on the database or the OS. (MS doesn't do complete regression tests either on some patches. I don't know about Sun, Linux, HP, IBM,etc)
Jim Received on Wed May 19 2004 - 19:18:26 CDT