Imagine that your database is being used by another system that directly reads data from few of the tables. I know this is not a good idea and I would not recommend anyone to do anything similar. Unfortunately developers often do what they don’t really want to do.

In this post I just want to document a very simple way of verifying that you are not removing or modifying tables and columns that are being used by someone else.

My solution is dumb unit tests that select table schema information for the list of tables and columns and then builds checksum that is finally compared to expected checksum.

I don’t pretend to sound like this somewhat dirty solution is a right way, but it is very quick to implement and effective way. Here is the implementation in C#:

Click here to see the gist.

In code above we verify that we are not removing or modifying few columns in tables Table1 and Table55, since they are used by SystemX. NUnit TestCase attributes are used to allow for multiple table checks. First parameter is a checksum that you would get for the first time by failing the unit test or by running query separately. Checksum calculation is simple but it has a bit of overburden with concatenating column names into one string and then parsing it again into a temp table for the “IN” condition. (Of course there are other ways, but I find this one to be a bit less code). Also it probably worth to mention that we apply database changes using FluentMigrator, so tracking what exactly was changed that caused particular Unit Test case to fail would be just to have a look at the latest commit.

I think this is acceptable solution for a small set of checks. Probably you need another solution if your database is heavily used by another systems.

Hopefully is helpful to someone. At least I write this post to have it handy for myself in case I need something similar done quickly.