Mock Databases and ActiveRecord
Fellow SRT employee Jay Harris has a great post on using SQLite's in-memory database feature to mock his database. He points out a few of the factors that drove him to investigate such an approach:
- I did not want a SQL Server installation to be a requirement for me, the other developers, and my Continuous Integration server.
- I wanted something fast. I didn't want to have to wait for SQL Server to build / tear down my schema.
- I wanted something isolated, so the other developers, and my CI server, and I wouldn't have contention over the same database, but didn't want to have to deal with independent SQL Server instances for everyone.