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Comment by asa400 | Hacker News Reader

I worked on a project where a dev wanted to mock out the database in tests "for performance, because the database is slow". I almost lost my shit.

Even funnier, this was all hypothetical and yet taken as gospel. We hadn't even written the tests yet, so it was impossible to say whether they were slow or not. Nothing had been measured, no performance budget had been defined, no prototype of the supposedly slow tests had been written to demonstrate the point.

We ended up writing - no joke - less than 100 tests total, almost all of which hit the database, including some full integration tests, and the entire test suite finished in a few seconds.

I'm all for building in a way that respects performance as an engineering value, but we got lost somewhere along the way.

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tne knly reason i like having mocks os so you can define all the data objects the whole way through, and see the whole workflow as if you'd written it on paper, without having to open a bunch of files or jump around. just top to bottom every object that is supposed to be there in what order

I like Mockito, it’s useful, but I’ll never understand mocking out DB stuff.

Why fake it when an integration test tests the real thing.

I’ve seen what you clearly have. Mocked ResultSets, mocked JDBC templates. “When you get SQL, it should be this string. These parameters should be set. Blah blah.”

It’s so much work. And it’s useless. Where does that SQL to check come from? Copy and paste, so it won’t catch a syntax error.

Test data is faked in each result. You can’t test foreign keys.

Just a bad idea. You’re so right. I find it odd some people are so anti-mock. Yeah it gets abused but that’s not the tool’s fault.

But DB calls are not a good spot to mock out.

> I almost lost my shit.

Hopefully one day you'll back at that, and realise what an immature attitude that was.

I'm sorry you felt the need to post this in response to a figure of speech. Please keep your moralizing to yourself. Thank you.

Well of course it was a figure of speech - if you meant it literally then I would not by prodding you about your medical condition. I was posting in response to your story that a colleague proposed a way of working or technical solution to something, and that this in some way enraged or otherwise upset you. And then you thought that made a good story to share online. That is, as I said, an immature response to a disagreement.

Unless that whole paragraph was a figure of speech, in which case what I said doesn't apply, and we can both go about our days.

No thanks, I'll pass on the amateur psychoanalysis. Good luck to you sir.

Hopefully one day I won’t have to deal with clowns like you.

Aw don't say that, you'll make me sad! There's nothing worse than a sad clown.

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