Towards mutation-based testing of column-oriented database queries

There has been tremendous growth over the last few years of applications employing column-oriented databases (a common type of non-relational database) to store unstructured or semi-structured data. These applications have queries present in the implementation which need to be tested. Despite many literature works focus on testing relational database applications having SQL queries, there has been very little effort in testing of applications having non-relational database queries, in particular, column-oriented database queries. This paper proposes to apply fault injection-based testing approach (mutation analysis) for Cassandra, which is a popular column-oriented non-relational database. We propose a set of mutation operators for queries written in Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and mutant killing criteria. We also perform an initial evaluation for two types of CQL commands: key space and columnfamily creation and management. Our proposed approach will be the beginning step for developers and practitioners for applying fault injection based testing concept in the vast area of testing applications having non-relational database queries.