I'm building some unit tests for my Python module which interfaces with a MySQL database via SQLAlchemy. From reading around I gather the best way to do this is to create a test database that I can query as if it was the real thing. I've done this however how should I test the existing queries in the module as they currently all point at the live database?
The only idea I'd come up with was to do something like the following:
def run_query(engine, db_name='live_db')
engine.execute(f'SELECT * FROM {db_name}.<table_name>')
I could then pass in test_db when I run the function from unittest. Is there a better way?
For a scalable testing approach, I would suggest having an intermediate DAL Layer than should decide to which DB the query should be routed.