[vlovich123]

They’re for integration tests not unit tests. Although the distinction is frequently treated as something that means something by purists, I only use it as a way to distinguish conceptually how many complex layers are being stacked since both run under “unit test frameworks” usually for reporting and assertion purposes. I view mocking as usually an anti-pattern. Careful DI usually gets you far enough and is easier to work with. You want the code under test to resemble what’s happening as much in production as possible. The more “extra” you have, the more time you’re wasting maintaining the test infrastructure itself which is generally negative value (your users don’t care about the feature being late because you were refactoring the codebase to be easier to test each function in isolation.

Empty databases should generally start quickly unless there’s some distributed consensus that’s happening (and even then, it’s all on a local machine…). You also don’t even need to tear it down all the way - just drop all tables.