How to run mstest unit tests so that an underlying database has time to build properly?

Question

I've got a C# library that I've written a lot of unit tests for. The library is a data access layer library and requires SQL Server's full-text indexing capabilities, which means LocalDb will not work. The unit tests are connecting to a local SQL Server instance. The project has an IDatabaseInitializer that drops and re-creates the database for each test, so each test has a fresh set of data to assume it can work against, meaning each test is capable of running on its own - no ordering needed.

A problem that I've had since day one on this, but never tackled yet, is that if I simply run all of the tests at once, some will fail. If I go back and run those tests individually then they succeed. It's not always the same tests that fail when I run all at once.

I've assumed that this is because they're all running so quickly and against the same database. Perhaps the database is not properly deleting and re-creating before the next test runs. On top of just a simple database, I've also got a SQL Server full-text index that some of my tests require in order to pass. The full-text index populates in the background and therefore is not "ready" immediately after populating the test database's tables. The full-text index may take a second or two to build. This causes my tests that target the full-text index to always fail, unless I step through the initializer in a debugger and pause a few seconds while the full-text index builds.

My question is, is there any way to avoid this clashing of database rebuilds? As a bonus, is there a way to "slow down" the tests that need the full-text index, so that it has time to populate?

Answer 1

You can use a database with fixed datas. For your tests you use a transaction that you begin on TestInitialize and rollback on TestCleanup