ERP testing, Oracle DB and constraints

In a previous life, I had the pleasure or writing many, many

scripts to uncover data corruption caused by heavy
customization and a lack of referential integrity (due to
limited use of database constraints) in the data set (using
Informix, not Oracle). This created major problems in the
implementation in preparation for our go live, which were
not readily apparent early in our testing process.

In my current life, our ERP project will be using Oracle as
the DB of choice, and our application choice will be either
Oracle or JDE. We intend to limit customization of the
applications as much as possible.

As we write our functional test scripts, is it overkill to
consider running PL/SQL scripts to evaluate what is actually

written to DB records as well as what appears on the screen
display? Can I count on Oracle's gold standard DB to throw
appropriate error messages when we attempt to violate these
constraints in all cases (referential integrity, duplicate
records, etc.), or should this be an area of focus? Any and

all replies are appreciated!

Depends on what you're doing. I'd like to say that I never write a script to
check data but I do....mostly ad hoc scripts using TOAD (Oracle Tool). One
good thing about JDE is that if the database throws an error then JDE picks
that error up and displays it in a jde.log. JDE itself will warn you of
duplicates and not allow them to happen. Here's an example of my very
favorite Oracle error that appears in a jde.log:

1590/1706 Tue Apr 23 05:11:00 2002 DBPERFRQ.C377
OCI0000178 - Unable to execute - 0 - INSERT INTO SYSB733.F9312

1590/1706 Tue Apr 23 05:11:00 2002 DBPERFRQ.C384
OCI0000179 - Error - ORA-00001: unique constraint (SYSB733.F9312_1)
violated

1590/1706 Tue Apr 23 05:11:00 2002 JDB_DRVM.C917
JDB9900401 - Failed to execute db request

1590/1706 Tue Apr 23 05:11:00 2002 JDB_EXET.C4438
JDB3400009 - Failed to perform Insert for F9312

Colin
B733.2 SP17.1_I1
Intel/NT/2000/Oracle 8.1.7.1