[hibernate-dev] [OGM] Embedded MongoDB for tests

[Gunnar Morling]

2013/6/27 Sanne Grinovero <sanne at hibernate.org>

> I heard good praises about this project, so it might be good, but I'd
> be concerned that we're not testing the real thing.
>
> This could be great to mock the db for some operations, but could it
> replace all of them while providing us with the same level of
> confidence ?
>
> What will the gap be in release times to adapt to mock newer features?
>

AFAICS there is no mocking involved, this is the actual MongoDB. It get's
the distribution from mongodb.org, unpacks and starts it. I think the term
"embedded" is a bit misleading, because really it starts a separate process
for mongod. The client then opens a TCP connection to the DB just as if it
was installed, so I don't think there is really any difference.

Considering that installing a MongoDB installation takes seconds, I
> don't see a big win in using it, while there is a potential list of
> trouble.
>

I think the win is increased ease of use, in particular for new developers.
E.g. I first wasn't aware that the mongo module isn't built by default when
doing "mvn install" on the root level unlike ehcache etc. (I know, I should
have read the readme ;)). It also makes it very easy to test against
different Mongo versions if required, also updating to a new version is
just a matter of changing the test configuration.


> Considering H2 has some options to have it mimick Oracle and MySQL,
> would you use it to test the ORM dialect for these databases? I don't
> think I'd trust that.
>

I think a more suitable comparison would be if there was an embedded
version of Oracle or MySQL, which I personally definitely would consider
for tests (when I installed Oracle last time on Ubuntu it really was a
pain, maybe it's easier nowadays).


> This project might be great for simpler cases but I think that
> replacing the "real thing" in our case will provide for lower quality
> releases; maybe we could have the best of two worlds by using profiles
> and providing this as a fallback when MongoDB is not installed, in
> which case on CI I would want to verify tests on both.
>

This might be an interesting option, too.

That said, I noticed one downside. EmbedMongo stores the distribution file
locally after it has downloaded it once, but it unpacks this archive each
time when starting the DB. That's not so bad when doing it once for the
entire test suite, but it is more significant when doing it for single
tests e.g. run from within the IDE.

Sanne
>

--Gunnar


>
>
> On 27 June 2013 15:24, Hardy Ferentschik <hardy at hibernate.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 27 Jan 2013, at 2:20 PM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org> wrote:
> >
> >> I just came across across "EmbedMongo" [1] which provides a way to run
> >> MongoDB embedded within an application. This is e.g. convenient for
> tests
> >> as it doesn't require a separately installed MongoDB instance.
> >
> > Interesting. I think that could be a nice solution.
> >
> >> I've tried it out with a single test and it worked as expected.
> >> Unfortunately MongoDB (the server) can't be retrieved as Maven
> dependency,
> >> EmbedMongo thus retrieves the distribution via HTTP and stores it in
> >> ~/.embedmongo/. This only happens once during the first usage.
> >
> > Sounds reasonable.
> >
> >> What do you think, would that be helpful to be used for the OGM MongoDB
> >> tests (it might well be that this or similar options have been discussed
> >> before and I just missed that)?
> >
> > I like the idea. AFAIK it has not been discussed so far.
> >
> > --Hardy
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