What can you use the RapidRep Test Suite for?

Rapid Rep includes a wizard that enables the user to compare data from different sources. The result is an Excel workbook in which differences between both data sources are documented.

 

EDP has found its way into our professional and private everyday lifes. Files and tables fill our harddrives and mailboxes, the data volume has been increasing for years, and often we face the problem that we want to test and compare these data.

Typical questions are:

• What exactly has changed in our Excel evaluation since last week?
• Has my colleague sent me a more recent file? He sent me one per email only yesterday....
• Were the sales figures from last month transferred correctly to the Data warehouse?
• Did porting of my addresses from MS Access to MySQL work?
• Are there any records that had been there previously and are no longer available now and vice versa? If so, which are that?
• ...

As early as half a screen being filled with data, it becomes difficult for the human eye to definitely recognise differences. If the data is in different formats even (e.g. XML on the one side, MySQL on the other) or in a different sorting, there is no way around technical support.

Before you start the wizard in the RapidRep development environment, you have to define two datasets whose differences you want to identify.

Both datasets can come from either of the 50 data sources RapidRep supports, and they can be combined as needed.

Examples:

• Compare the content of an SQL server table to the content of an Oracle table
• Compare the content of an XML file to the content of a DB2 view
• Compare the content of a CSV file with the content of an XML file
• etc.

The wizard is intelligent and it recognises which fields shall likely be compared based on column names and file types. You can change this pre-selection as desired and also specifically exclude certain attributes from the comparison.

You can specify the primary key which identifies the datasets. Likewise, you can specify the type and number of detected deviations which RapidRep outputs in an Excel workbook.

The wizard will be done after a short period of time and you can repeat this specific data comparison any number of times and for example integrate it into your test process.