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A Better Db2 for z/OS Testing Experience

As Db2 application complexity grows, and as the need to avoid application downtime and inefficiency reaches a critical level, the need for efficient application testing becomes evident. But today's application developers often find themselves struggling to complete the level of testing required to ensure deployment of reliable, high-performing applications that meet usability standards.

Application testers often are tasked with testing against a copy of production data. This is both cumbersome to test against and time consuming just to set up. Loading production volumes of data to test tables is very costly as well. TestBase Db2 Subset allows them to get meaningful subsets of test data and load them to the test environment. Testing against smaller sets of data is also easier.

Because getting and setting up test data is difficult, application developers and quality assurance personnel often attempt to use the same test data and then frequently find that the data has already been compromised or corrupted. Testing is not always just query.

Running the right number of tests to properly verify all new SQL code or enhancements within increasingly compressed development and testing cycles has become a serious burden for Db2 Application Testers. Also, many companies are still using confidential production data for testing purposes - despite laws that mandate removal of all information about real customers and employees from application testing environments.

What application developers and DBAs need is a comprehensive set of testing tools that:

  • Enable shared testing of a common set of Db2 objects without impacting other tester's results or other tester's data.
  • Enable developers to run more tests with smaller amounts of data.
  • Eliminate confidential information from test data to ensure ongoing data privacy regulation compliance.
  • Ability to see and change test data using a familiar interface

TestBase Db2 Slice provides the shared testing environment, TestBase Db2 Subset provides the smaller amounts of data, TestBase Db2 Mask provides the data privacy, and Testbase Db2 Edit provides the ability to see and change test data using a familiar ISPF interface. These 3 tools make testing easy enough that testers want to run more tests. More testing is better testing. Even results can be compared using the compare feature of TestBase Db2 Slice.

SoftBase's TestBase Data Masking featured in Government Security News Magazine