SQL knowledge – an essential atrribute for a tester

SQL knowledge – an essential atrribute for a tester

Couple of days back, one of the job aspirants was asking me if he really needs to learn SQL when he is planning to work as black box tester.  This triggered me to elaborate the need of SQL knowledge for the testers.
The extreme important part of the testing is use of right set of test data for different business scenarios and for varied business logics. From a database containing thousand of records, selecting a particular record exactly matching your test data requirement is a tedious task. The application ‘Search’ option may or may not support you to search the record based on your parameters. Only option is to use SQL ‘Select’ query to choose the test data matching your requirement. Example could be checking ‘Billing’ scenario for a Telecom company. You test case checks the discount calculation for a customer who has started a new discount plan in mid of the billing cycle. To search for such a customer from database, SQL is the best option.
Manual creation of large chunk of test data or refreshing test environment database for every new execution cycle or for sanitizing (to mask or change the sensitive information) the test data copied from production environment,  testers need knowledge of database structure and SQL queries.
Testing of user reports is another important aspect where the content of the report need to be validated against the database. Knowledge of SQL enables the tester to check the report content correctness.
Data migration testing is entirely driven by use of SQL queries to select and compare the data from source database and target database. Along with SQL, it also requires knowledge of database table structure to check the data mapping and conversion rules.
BI testing or ETL testing is another specialized testing area, which demands extensive knowledge of database and SQL to check the ETL transactions and analytics reports.
So being a tester, one really cannot escape from using SQL. Hence it’s better to learn SQL before you start working as tester.

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