Pax JDBC: An OSGi JDBC Service

Pax JDBC is a new project under the OPS4J umbrella which simplifies the use of JDBC drivers in OSGi applications by providing a generic driver extender and various native driver adapters for your favourite database.

This project aims at compliance with the OSGi Enterprise Release 5.0 specification.

Pax JDBC 0.1.0 is available from Maven Central, with native adapters for Apache Derby and PostgreSQL. Since this first release, support for H2 and MySQL has been added, and further contributions are always welcome.

Spring Integration Tests with Real Transactions

Spring's Test Context has a @Transactional annotation for wrapping tests in a transaction started and rolled back by the test container, to keep the tests from modifying the database. This is just what you need for deterministic, repeatable database tests.

On the other hand, due to this approach, the transaction boundaries in your test system differ from the ones in your production system, which can lead to errors in production which were never noticed in your tests suites.

I wouldn't go as far as saying that transactional tests should be considered harmful, but at least you should be aware of the side effects which may or may not be harmless in your specific use case.

For tests with real transactions, you need to take care of cleaning up the database yourself.

JUnit rules are a neat way of doing this. Here is an example:

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Hamburg Elections Powered by MySQL

Following a link on Google to the intermediate results of today's elections in Hamburg on the official website of Statistikamt Nord (Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein Statistics Office), I found this:

Ok, the good news is that our taxes don't get wasted on expensive Oracle licenses...