22. Slony-I Test Bed Framework

As of version 1.1.5, Slony-I has a common test bed framework intended to better support running a comprehensive set of tests at least somewhat automatically. Older tests used pgbench (not a bad thing) but were troublesome to automate because they were set up to spawn each slon in an xterm for the user to watch.

The new test framework is mostly written in Bourne shell, and is intended to be portable to both Bash (widely used on Linux) and Korn shell (widely found on commercial UNIX systems). The code lives in the source tree under the tests directory.

At present, nearly all of the tests make use of only two databases that, by default, are on a single PostgreSQL postmaster on one host. This is perfectly fine for those tests that involve verifying that Slony-I functions properly on various sorts of data. Those tests do things like varying date styles, and creating tables and sequences that involve unusual names to verify that quoting is being handled properly.

It is also possible to configure environment variables so that the replicated nodes will be placed on different database backends, optionally on remote hosts, running varying versions of PostgreSQL.

Here are some of the vital files...

This is the central script for running tests. Typical usage is thus:

./run_test.sh

usage ./run_test.sh testname

You need to specify the subdirectory name of the test set to be run; each such set is stored in a subdirectory of tests.

You may need to set one or more of the following environment variables to reflect your local configuration. For instance, the writer runs "test1" against PostgreSQL 8.0.x using the following command line:

 PGBINDIR=/opt/OXRS/dbs/pgsql8/bin PGPORT=5532 PGUSER=cbbrowne ./run_test.sh test1 
PGBINDIR

This determines where the test scripts look for PostgreSQL and Slony-I binaries. The default is /usr/local/pgsql/bin.

There are also variables PGBINDIR1 thru PGBINDIR13 which allows you to specify a separate path for each database instance. That will be particularly useful when testing interoperability of Slony-I across different versions of PostgreSQL on different platforms. In order to create a database of each respective version, you need to point to an initdb of the appropriate version.

PGPORT

This indicates what port the backend is on. By default, 5432 is used.

There are also variables PORT1 thru PORT13 which allow you to specify a separate port number for each database instance. That will be particularly useful when testing interoperability of Slony-I across different versions of PostgreSQL.

PGUSER

By default, the user postgres is used; this is taken as the default user ID to use for all of the databases.

There are also variables USER1 thru USER13 which allow specifying a separate user name for each database instance. As always, with Slony-I, this needs to be a PostgreSQL "superuser."

HOST

By default, localhost is used.

There are also variables HOST1 thru HOST13 which allow specifying a separate host for each database instance.

DB1 thru DB13

By default, slonyregress1 thru slonyregress13 are used.

You may override these from the environment if you have some reason to use different names.

ENCODING

By default, UNICODE is used, so that tests can create UTF8 tables and test the multibyte capabilities.

MY_MKTEMP_IS_DECREPIT

If your version of Linux uses a variation of mktemp that does not generate a full path to the location of the desired temporary file/directory, then set this value.

Within each test, you will find the following files:

If there are additional test steps, such as running EXECUTE SCRIPT, additional slonik and SQL scripts may be necessary.