[Dbix-class] Caching DBIx-Class Fixtures

[Drew Taylor]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Ash Berlin <ash_cpan at firemirror.com> wrote:
> On 18 Jun 2008, at 11:38, Ovid wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Pursuant to an idea I've outlined in
>> http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/36711, we're looking at caching some
>> of our test fixtures.  While some might *require* being generated
>> dynamically, many of our fixtures are in the following form:
>>
>> Or is there a much easier way of going about this?
>>
>
> First thing I'd suggest is to look at DBIx::Class::Fixtures and see how
> close it comes to your needs. (I'm guessing you haven't looked at it yet
> judging by your useperl post)

The second thing you'll want to look at after checking out
D::C::Fixtures is dumping the resulting fixture data in whatever
native format your database handles and importing that in your tests.
In my case (I'm running Postgres), I ended up with several thousand
individual fixture files which took an enormous amount of time to
process because of all the extra IO. Enough that it made running tests
prohibitive. So what I did was modify my dumping procedure to do this:
do a dump of the data I want from the source database using
D::C::Fixtures::dump(), then import the resulting fixtures into my
test database with populate(). Finally I run pg_dump on the test
database and save that to a file. When I want to repopulate the test
database, then it only takes 10 seconds instead of 60+ seconds because
I'm importing my pg_dump file rather than then 3k+ individual fixtures
files.

Luke and I have discussed briefly how we can encapsulate this
behavior, but we haven't gone further than that. Patches & ideas
welcome! :-)

Drew
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