Observation 1: Applications are written human beings, which tend to make mistakes. It's a good idea to have some tools in place to help catch those mistakes early by validating assumptions against reality. One such tool is unit testing. Observation 2: Almost every application out there needs access to some kind of persistent data storage. In a lot of application code, that storage mechanism is some kind of relational database. It is easy to understand, based on the situations described above, that unit testing tools should take into account handling initializing persistent storage systems properly for testing. Thankfully, JUnit has some extensions to make unit testing with a particular set of data in the relational DB easier. DBUnit provides a way to represent test relational data in an XML form that is human readable, and can be loaded into most any JDBC data source. DBUnit's strategy is to reset the database to a known good base state before each unit test runs. I...
