The Cucumber Book

Cleaning the Database with Truncation

Truncating the database before each scenario is a brute-force technique, and the main drawback is that it’s generally slower than rolling back a transaction. This is why the transactional approach is generally preferable if you can get away with it. The advantage of truncation is that it’s a cleaning strategy that works reliably when we have more than one database connection, since no transactions are used. Let’s modify our cleaning strategy and see how it compares. This is a simple change in our database.rb file, shown below.

Joe asks:

Why Not Truncate the Database in an After Hook?

Truncating the database ...