Testing Complex Query + Email

[Steve Bryant]

I have done a little unit testing so far with basic code, but I hit a
new challenge today.

I am trying to figure out how to write unit tests for some complicated
SQL that will return several rows as well as for the email messages
that will be sent out by the same component.

I know that I could manually create a query, but that would assume
that I knew ahead of time what rows should be returned.

My instinct is to write a test case for each logical fact about the
rows being returned, but that would mean that I would be looping over
the (potentially very large) recordset and then performing
(potentially complicated) queries for each record. Normally, I don't
think about performance in testing at all, but this is the sort of
thing that could bog a server pretty badly (and I only have the one
server for this client).

As a separate matter, I'm not sure how to test email.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Steve