Helen,

> Our test criteria have the overload of platform portability to take into
> account, of course, which makes the reconstruction of TCS so much more
> challenging.

Actually I am not sure that this is the case for a lot of the tests.
Would it not be possible to run a lot of the tests from a standard
client?

So you build the server for platform x and y and z but you run the tests
on client A which connects to the server you want to test.

I would think this would work fine for all the following tests. To my
mind other tests would be unit tests that work with the build process
rather than a completely separate code base.

a) Meta data

Create/modify struture
Check meta data is correct

b) Query

Excute query and check you get the expected results

c) Update

insert/update/delete data
check result is correct
run query to check data is correct

d) Multi-user/transactions

In 2 threads test commit/rollback/visibility/deadlock etc

e) Tools

eg Run gbak and do a file compare on the resulting filee with a known
good version