> The only thing enforcing these invariants in production is the interplay between your database schema and the queries you execute against it."
I'm unsure that I agree. The two examples you gave, establishing that IDs are unique and that updates to entities in the system are serializable (and linearizable while we're here), are plenty doable without having to touch the real database. (In fact, as far as the former is concerned, this dual approach to testing is what made me adopt having a wholly separate "service"[0] in my applications for doling out IDs to things. I used to work in a big Kafka shop that you've almost certainly heard of, and they taught me how to deal with the latter.)
That said, I'd never advocate for just relying on one approach over the other. Do both. Absolutely do both.
> I'm pretty sure "don't repeat yourself" thinking has led to the vast majority of the bad ideas I've seen so far in my career. It's a truly crippling brainworm, and I wish computer schools wouldn't teach it.
I brought up WET mostly to comment that, if there's one place in software development where copying and pasting is to be encouraged, testing is it. I'd like to shelve the WET vs. DRY debate as firmly out of scope for this thread if that's alright.
0: It's a service inasmuch as an instance of a class implementing an interface can be a service, but it opens up the possibility of more easily refactoring to cross over into running against multiple databases later.
I've often been tempted to make an "id service" also because you can potentially get compact integer ids that are globally unique. That'll likely save you more than a factor of 2 in your ID fields given varint encoding, which could be very significant in overall throughput depending on what your data look like. Never actually tried it IRL though.
I agree both approaches are important, and it's totally ok if they overlap. If your unit tests have some overlap on your integration tests, that's nbd especially seeing as you can run your unit tests in parallel.
EDIT: actually I'll make a much bolder claim: even if your unit tests are making flawed assumptions about the underlying dependencies, it's still pretty much fine so long as you also exercise those dependencies in integration tests. That is, even somewhat bit-rotted unit tests with flawed mocks and assertions are still valuable because they exercise the code. More shots on goal is a great thing even if they're not 100% reliable.
> If your unit tests have some overlap on your integration tests, that's nbd especially seeing as you can run your unit tests in parallel.
Exactly.
Another upside I've run into while doing things this way is that it gets me out of being relational database-brained. Sometimes, you really do not need the full-blown relational data model when a big blob of JSON will work just fine.
I'm unsure that I agree. The two examples you gave, establishing that IDs are unique and that updates to entities in the system are serializable (and linearizable while we're here), are plenty doable without having to touch the real database. (In fact, as far as the former is concerned, this dual approach to testing is what made me adopt having a wholly separate "service"[0] in my applications for doling out IDs to things. I used to work in a big Kafka shop that you've almost certainly heard of, and they taught me how to deal with the latter.)
That said, I'd never advocate for just relying on one approach over the other. Do both. Absolutely do both.
> I'm pretty sure "don't repeat yourself" thinking has led to the vast majority of the bad ideas I've seen so far in my career. It's a truly crippling brainworm, and I wish computer schools wouldn't teach it.
I brought up WET mostly to comment that, if there's one place in software development where copying and pasting is to be encouraged, testing is it. I'd like to shelve the WET vs. DRY debate as firmly out of scope for this thread if that's alright.
0: It's a service inasmuch as an instance of a class implementing an interface can be a service, but it opens up the possibility of more easily refactoring to cross over into running against multiple databases later.