[fpc-pascal] OT: Amazing new development tools

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2012, ik wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 13:25, zeljko <zeljko at holobit.net> wrote:
>> On Sunday 26 of February 2012 11:43:38 Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I don't see him doing this in huge corporate administrative business
>>
>>> programs where hundreds of database tables are involved.
>>
>>
>> and that tables can contain billion of rows ... so visualisation won't be so
>> snappy :)
>
> It depends on your tests. That visualization is for test driven
> development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development).
>
> In Ruby I use Cucumber for such things, and then you can provide also
> a table with possible values to see how it will react.

That is childs play; good for some simple website stuff.

We're talking corporate RDBMS here.

Take a school. To be able to test for example data entry of a pupil who comes 
to inscribe, I need to create and set up the whole eco-system for my pupil:
- Table with schools
- Table with countries
- Table with cities
- Table with addresses
- Table with nationalities
- Tables with values for all kinds of parameters.
- Table with groups in my school.
- Table with teaching subjects.
- Table with teachers teaching the subject.
All these tables have constraints, time dependencies, whatnot.

I cannot even start testing anything pupil-related without having properly set up all this first :/

To be able to visualize or test all that, you need detailed knowledge of the system;
a simple "test table with possible values" is unusable; all tables are linked together 
somehow. For the same reason I never understood the use of 'test data generators' 
functionalities in database modeling tools. The generated data is utterly useless...

Michael.