Stratagies for Data Loading and DB Initialization for Integration Tests

Question

I'm developing an integration testing framework for a data intensive J2EE enterprise application and I'm trying to decide upon a strategy for initializing and populating the database. We have a fairly complex model.

The system will have to:

1. Initialize the system itself
2. Load users
3. Load application test data

The test data won't be as complex as the system will handle, load and stress testing is the domain of a specialized test team. We're interested in how well the UI's display what is in the system and that functions integration correctly from top to bottom.

Answer 1

DBUnit is a pretty good framework for loading data into a test database.

Answer 2

Unitils provides support for both loading the test data and keeping the test DB schema up-to-date. In order for the latter to work, your schema change scripts need to follow a particular naming convention.