Testing Technique when using a DB

I tried posting this from Google Groups but I did not see it come through after an hour so this may be a duplicate message for some.

The current testing technique for things like Ruby On Rails has three choices but all of the choices will not work in my case.

The first choice is "truncate" which starts a transaction before each test. If the testing is within the same process, this works and a roll back restores the DB. But if the testing involves two processes, then the test data entered by the test rig can not be seen by the "system under test" (SUT). With Rails, there are times when this is needed. The test rig drives a browser which calls into a Rails application. There are "dangerous" ways to still use this method but each has various down falls or risks.

The other two choices are delete and truncate which both end up with an empty database just after each test. This prevents any test data that is already in the database from being used after the first test. Note that a "test run" will run through a sequence of tests (usually quite a few).

All of these are fairly fast with each one being "faster" under different conditions (according to users).

Generally, this pushes the Rails community to have either "fixtures" or "factories". Both are ok solutions but both also have problems. In my case, I have a dozen or so tables all with very tight constraints and creating either fixtures or factories is very troublesome. Also, I have a real database with real data in production and it seems foolish not to take advantage of the knowledge contained within that database. By "knowledge" I mean the particular values and weirdness within the data that a factory or a fixture might not realize.

One choice would be to create the database, use it, and then drop it for each test. I would create the database from a template that already has data taken from the production database (and probably trimmed down to a small subset of it). This requires some crafty dancing in the Rails set up since it likes to just attach to a database and run but it could be done. From first blush, this sounds like it would be really slow but may be not.

The other choice would be to somehow copy the data to temporary tables before the test run and then copy it back. The advantage to this is it is not very PostgreSQL specific. Indeed, if the template database is already set up, then only one copy would be needed at the start of the test.

The other thought I had is if there is some type of "leaky" transaction. A transaction where another process can see the data but the roll back would still work and be effective. Essentially I'm asking if all the protections a database offers could be dropped... but I thought I'd see if that was possible.

The other thought is perhaps there is a "snap shot" type concept. I don't see it in the list of SQL commands. A "snap shot" would do exactly what it sounds like. It would take a snap shot and save it somehow. Then a "restore to snap shot" would restore the DB back to that state.

I thought this group might suggest other ideas and either nuke the really bad ideas or promote the plausible ideas I've mentioned above.

Sorry for the long post. I appreciate your thoughts.

Perry