# Unit-testing sql interactions

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unit-testing-sql-interactions/84452>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [February 4, 2007, 8:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unit-testing-sql-interactions/84452 "2007-02-04T20:26:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![crucoba](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/e8c25b/32.png) [@crucoba](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/crucoba)\
**Post date:** [February 4, 2007, 8:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unit-testing-sql-interactions/84452/1 "2007-02-04T20:26:11Z")

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I’m relatively new to SQL, and I’d like to get my hands a bit dirtier.  
So I’m writing a toy application (in Ruby, of course) to let me get  
some more experience. And I’m avoiding high-level SQL libraries  
(e.g. ActiveRecord) because I don’t think I’d learn as much about SQL  
that way.

The application will use MySQL, but I don’t feel comfortable writing  
code without unit tests, and I’d rather not use MySQL there. So the  
way I’d imagine this working is going through some sort of  
database-independent layer, which I can either hook up to MySQL or  
some sort of in-memory database.

Questions:

1. Is that a reasonable way to proceed?

2. What’s the right database-independent layer? ruby-odbc?

3. What should I use for the fast in-memory database for unit testing?  
Googling suggests that SQLite is a possibility, but it’s not clear  
to me that it’s the best choice for this task.

Thanks,  
David C.  
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid