Towards Testing of Full-Scale SQL Applications using Relational Symbolic Execution

Constraint-based testing is an automatic test case generation approach where the tested application is transformed into constraints whose solutions are adequate test data. In previous work, we have shown that this technique is particularly well-suited for testing SQL applications, as the semantics of SQL can be naturally transformed into standard SMT constraints, using so-called relational symbolic execution. In particular, we have demonstrated such testing to be possible in practice with current solver techniques for small-scale applications. In this work, we identify the main challenges and provide research directions towards constraint-based testing of full-scale SQL applications. We investigate the additional research work needed to integrate relational and dynamic symbolic execution, handle properly dynamic SQL, generate tractable SMT constraints for most SQL applications, detect SQL runtime errors and deal with non-deterministic SQL.