Re: Optimise PostgreSQL for fast testing

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:05 AM, David Salisbury <salisbury(at)globe(dot)gov> wrote:
>
>
> On 2/23/12 9:06 AM, Jack Christensen wrote:
>>
>> As another Rails developer using PostgreSQL I think I can explain the
>> use case. In standard Rails usage, the ORM handles all SQL query
>> generation and thus the application is database agnostic. It is typical
>> to use SQLite in development and testing and MySQL or PostgreSQL in
>> production. However, if any PostgreSQL specific functionality is used
>> then obviously PostgreSQL must also be used in development and testing.
>>
>> Another common practice is test-driven development. So the test suite
>> for the application may run scores or hundreds of times per day per
>> developer. So the speed of the test suite is of vital importance to
>> developers. A 30 second difference 100's of times per day really can add
>> up.
>
>
> Perhaps the emphasis should be on the tests themselves, and not PG cycles.
> Is he using Factory or Factory.build?.. that sort of thing.  Is he running
> the entire test suite, when in fact just running one test would do until
> final checkin?
>
> And I'm curious as to why anyone would need to run tests 100s of times a
> day.
> How much code can ya write, or is he simply writing tests themselves all
> day?

He's probably doing automated continuous integration testing. Two
jobs ago we had a setup to do that and had 40k tests. The whole test
suite took about 30 minutes to runm and kicked off automatically when
the last one finished and anyone touched any code.