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Docker makes database integration testing so much easier

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Introduction

When I started writing High-Performance Java Persistence, I decided to install four database systems on my current machine:

  • Oracle XE

  • SQL Server Express Edition

  • PostgreSQL

  • MySQL

These four relational databases are the most commonly referred ones on our forum, StackOverflow, as well as on most JIRA issues. However, these four top-ranked databases are not enough because, from time to time, we need to integrate Pull Requests for other database systems, like Informix or DB2.

Since installing a plethora of databases on a single machine is not very practical, we can do better than that. Many database providers have generated Docker images for their products, and this post is going to show you haw easy we can start an Informix database.

Running Informix on Docker

IBM offers Docker images for both Informix Innovator-C and DB2 Express-C.

As explained on Docker Hub, you have to start the container using the following command:

docker run -it --name iif_innovator_c --privileged -p 9088:9088 -p 27017:27017 -p 27018:27018 -p 27883:27883 -e LICENSE=accept ibmcom/informix-innovator-c:latest

To run the Informix Docker container, you have to execute the following command:

docker start iif_innovator_c

After the Docker container is started, we can attach a new shell to it:

docker exec -it iif_innovator_c bash

We have a databases.gradle configuration file which contains the connection properties for all databases we use for testing, and, for Informix, we have the following entry:

informix : [
    'db.dialect' : 'org.hibernate.dialect.InformixDialect',
    'jdbc.driver': 'com.informix.jdbc.IfxDriver',
    'jdbc.user'  : 'informix',
    'jdbc.pass'  : 'in4mix',
    'jdbc.url'   : 'jdbc:informix-sqli://192.168.99.100:9088/sysuser:INFORMIXSERVER=dev;user=informix;password=in4mix'
]

With this configuration in place, I only need to setup the current hibernate.properties configuration file to use Informix:

gradle clean testClasses -Pdb=informix

Now I can run any Informix integration test right from my IDE.

When I’m done, I stop the Docker container with the following command:

docker stop iif_innovator_c

As simple as that!

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