[BenoitP]

> should spin up an entire instance of Oracle

I'm sort of doing that at the moment, with postgres and series of tests. But it is still useful for unit testing too: pull up the right CREATE tables, INSERT your test data, execute your tests, then drop tables (lots of safeguards here), and repeat. The container loads up in 1.5 sec, and all my tests (~100) are done in 10 seconds.

It's been great in my use case. I'm on postgres, Java, and using testcontainers. They have handy containers available, not limited to RDBMS and not even limited to databases; and here is Oracle Express edition, which should be enough for most tests:

https://www.testcontainers.org/modules/databases/oraclexe/