DBUnit is very nice for testing database content changes made by an application. You define in XML the data including the structure of your tables (dataset.xml).

Simple_Data is the name of the table and each column is a attribute in the xml doc with the content value e.g. id with value 1.

The Getting Started of DBUnit work with JUnit 3.8 and self handling of the JDBC Connection.

JUnit 4.x are more comfortable with annotations based test methods and Spring comes with dependency injection for separating
configuration from implementation code.

The following approach combines DBUnit with JUnit 4.4 and Spring 2.5.6 to test comfortable a Oracle 10g database.

I use Maven 2.x to define the depending libraries used by the example (pom.xml):

	4.0.0
	de.schaeftlein.dev.dbunit
	test-dbunit
	test-dbunit
	0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
	
	
		
			org.dbunit
			dbunit
			2.4.2
		
		
			org.springframework
			spring
			2.5.6
			jar
			compile
		
		
			junit
			junit
			4.4
		
		
			commons-dbcp
			commons-dbcp
			1.2.2
		
		
			org.springframework
			spring-test
			2.5.6
		
		
			org.slf4j
			slf4j-api
			1.5.6
		
		
			org.slf4j
			log4j-over-slf4j
			1.5.6
		
		
			log4j
			log4j
			1.2.14
		
		
			org.slf4j
			slf4j-log4j12
			1.5.6
		
		
			com.oracle
			ojdbc14
			10.2.0.2.0
		
	

Keep in mind that the Oracle JDBC Driver has to be downloaded manually.
The public maven repos include only the Pom definition for the oracle driver. Generate with maven command line tool the eclipse project files:

mvn clean eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse

The JDBC datasource is defined via Spring (applicationContext.xml):

Additionally we define the expected data as well in XML for DBUnit (expectedDataSet.xml):

Now we can code our JUnit 4.x Test to

1. load data before the test method
2. change the data via JDBC to emulate a application
3. compare the changed data with expected data
4. clean up the database

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations={"classpath:applicationContext.xml"}) 
public class TestDBUnitWithSpring {

	@Autowired
	private DataSource dataSource;
	
	@Before
	public void init() throws Exception{
		// insert data into db
		DatabaseOperation.CLEAN_INSERT.execute(getConnection(), getDataSet());
	}
	
	@After
	public void after() throws Exception{
		// insert data into db
		DatabaseOperation.DELETE_ALL.execute(getConnection(), getDataSet());
	}
	
	private IDatabaseConnection getConnection() throws Exception{
	// get connection
		Connection con = dataSource.getConnection();
		DatabaseMetaData  databaseMetaData = con.getMetaData();
		// oracle schema name is the user name
		IDatabaseConnection connection = new DatabaseConnection(con,databaseMetaData.getUserName().toUpperCase());
		DatabaseConfig config = connection.getConfig();
		// oracle 10g 
		config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_DATATYPE_FACTORY, new Oracle10DataTypeFactory());
		// receycle bin
		config.setFeature(DatabaseConfig.FEATURE_SKIP_ORACLE_RECYCLEBIN_TABLES, Boolean.TRUE);
		return connection;
	}
	
	private IDataSet getDataSet() throws Exception{
		// get insert data
		File file = new File("src/test/resources/dataset.xml");
		return new FlatXmlDataSet(file);
	}
	
	@Test
	public void testSQLUpdate() throws Exception{
		Connection con = dataSource.getConnection();
		Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
		// get current data
		ResultSet rst = stmt.executeQuery("select * from simple_data where id = 1");
		if(rst.next()){
			// from dataset.xml
			assertEquals("value_before", rst.getString("content"));
			rst.close();
			
			// update via sql
			int count = stmt.executeUpdate("update simple_data set content='value_after' where id=1");

			stmt.close();
			con.close();

			// expect only one row to be updated
			assertEquals("one row should be updated", 1, count);

			// Fetch database data after executing the code
			QueryDataSet databaseSet = new QueryDataSet(getConnection());
			// filter data
			databaseSet.addTable("simple_data", "select * from simple_data where id = 1");
			ITable actualTable = databaseSet.getTables()[0];

			// Load expected data from an XML dataset
			IDataSet expectedDataSet = new FlatXmlDataSet(new File("src/test/resources/expectedDataSet.xml"));
			ITable expectedTable = expectedDataSet.getTable("simple_data");

			// filter unnecessary columns of current data by xml definition
			actualTable = DefaultColumnFilter.includedColumnsTable(actualTable, expectedTable.getTableMetaData().getColumns());

			// Assert actual database table match expected table
			assertEquals(1,expectedTable.getRowCount());
			assertEquals(expectedTable.getRowCount(), actualTable.getRowCount());
			assertEquals(expectedTable.getValue(0, "content"), actualTable.getValue(0, "content"));
			
		} else {
			fail("no rows");
			rst.close();
			stmt.close();
			con.close();
		}

	}
}