I am a hibernate + Oracle user and I can't decide which is the better way of unit testing my DAO layer,

1. AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests + Oracle DB
2. HSQLDB

Thoughts anyone?

I used to use HSQLDB a lot. It is easy to start, easy to manipulate the data (in the script file) and doesn't take a lot of my notebook's resources. I found, hoever, the sequence generation harder to set up than Oracle.

I also used to have a full install of Oracle 10g, but it ran like a dog and slowed the pc to a halt.

I am now running Oracle 10g Express and it performs well, without draining the machine. Since our production is Oracle, I'd prefer to run the unit tests against Oracle anyway, to avoid any surprises.

With AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests, one can finish the test with the method setComplete() to leave the data in anyway if required.

Regards
Alan