Best Ways to Manage/Seed Test Data

Several possible options were discussed:

• Using the DAOs to help seed/examine data (eg. testSaveAndGet)
• SQL Scripts to seed test data
• JDBC statements
• DBUnit
• Serialised java objects

Specific tools were mentioned that can assist in managing the data:

• Liquibase http://www.liquibase.org
  • Version control schema and seed data
  • Automatic handling of RDBMS schema upgrades/downgrades
  • Handling of seed/reference data
  • Handling of test data driven by environment variables
  • support or Refactoring of RDBMS
• Unitils http://unitils.org
  • Manages simple insertion of test data with DBUnit on a test by test basis
• GenerateData.com
  • a free site that generates real adddresses and data based on factors a random amount of times that you can then inject into SQL
• HSQL (Hypersonic)
  • a good way to create databases from Hibernate, in memory