I just read a post asking if my unit test take too long. In it the author suggests that 5 minutes is long and asks if anyone has solved this problem. This reminded me of a discussion I had with some developers about 12 months ago about unit testing in which my argument was simply that unit tests need to be comprehensive and not necessarily quick.

There are many projects where the unit tests take several hours to run. This shouldn’t matter during development when you’re probably only interested in a few unit tests as most test tools provide a way to filter the tests that are run. You only need to run the entire test suite prior to committing or during continuous integration.

Having said all of that I can recommend using memory tables if your database supports them. The operations are generally a lot faster as the database doesn’t need to write to disk.