Database Unit Testing is underestimated by many (too many!) IT companies. Personally, in my long career, I’ve never seen it properly implemented. In the past there might have been lack of right tools for testing database objects but nowadays the market offers a good choice of software able to fill this gap. Because of my deep love for Oracle products (and I’ve never kept it secret) I’ve recently decided to spend some time analyzing Oracle SQL Developer and give it a shot to see how good is the unit testing support. This post refers to SQL Developer version 18.1 connected to an Oracle database release 12.1.0.2.
The version 18.1, latest release at the moment, has a ton of interesting features but the purpose of this post is to just focus on the db unit testing part, specifically on REF CURSORS. I really like how Oracle implemented this testing module in SQL Developer: it’s clear, it has a guided wizard which makes it easy to create tests, it supports shared repositories and allows to save libraries for reusing code. The only problem I had in the past releases is that REF CURSORS were not properly supported. I was hoping to see an improvement in this latest update but unfortunately it’s not the case and I will show in this post what I mean.