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copied!<p>You say that you don't want to use an ORM, but I choose to disregard that in my answer. Sorry :)</p> <h3>How to populate</h3> <p>I prefer inserting data into the database using the same operations that a user would. That is, if I need an order for a product in the database, I create the product using the admin interface, let a user create an account using the public interface and have that user place an order.</p> <p>This doesn't have to be done by clicking buttons in the actual UI, but preferably using an underlying abstraction of the UI.</p> <p>Benefits:</p> <ul> <li>The database will have the same state as when executed for real, not the state <em>you think</em> it will have</li> <li>If you need to make changes, e.g. to the schema, you only have to change the production code</li> <li>More features are covered by the tests</li> <li>The database is populated only with data needed for this perticular use case</li> <li>The test are easier to read (it's not easy to read insert scripts)</li> </ul> <p>Drawbacks:</p> <ul> <li>It's slower</li> <li>Does't work well if you need <em>a lot</em> of data (which is rare)</li> </ul> <p>I've only needed a large amount of data for tests once. For that I created my own declarative domain specific language with which I could specify the necessary data in a (<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691090%28v=vs.71%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">verbatim</a>) string inside my test. Then I wrote a tool that parsed the data and inserted it into the database.</p> <h3>Clean the database</h3> <p>There are several ways to clean the database: re-create the database; delete all data; execute the test in a transaction and make a rollback... My faviourite, though, is not to clean the database. For every test I create a new user and a new product (using the example from above). I don't have to clean the database and still the tests won't interfere with each other. Also, I will have the data around after the test if I need to inspect it.</p> <p>Hope it's somewhat helpful even though it's not really an answer to your question.</p>

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