The normal operation of the space manager was tested by having a set of tests that use every call in the interface. Then, several pathological cases were explored. We forced the space map to span several pages, by having a large number of pages and a smaller sized page. Then, the allocation and deallocation of runs that span across page boundaries were checked. Similarly, the header page can also overflow. By having a small enough page size (128 bytes), we forced the directory to overflow across several pages and tested the routines that insert, delete and retrieve file entries.
The multiuser version of the space manager uses shared memory for storing the space map and the directory, Synchronization of accesses to shared memory was tested by designing one process to lock the shared memory and sleep for a while. This caused the other processes to block trying to access the shared memory. When the first process woke up and released the lock, the other process could finish its execution.
The heapfile component was exhaustively tested by a series of tests. These use all the methods in the public interface to the heapfile and in several different combinations. We inserted large number of records that caused the heapfile to grow to many pages. Under such conditions, we tested the working of inserts, deletes, scans and all other operations.
Our code has been integrated with several other components and has been used by them for several weeks. No major bug has been reported by any of them, thus reenforcing the reliability of our code. The space management code has been used by the buffer manager group. Heapfiles have been used by the catalogs group among others.
