Is there a simpler way to restore state between SqlAlchemy integration tests?

For unit tests I think the standard approach of regenerating the entire database is what makes the most sense, as you've seen in my examples and many others. But I agree, for large applications this can take a lot of time during your test run.

Thanks to SQLAlchemy you can get away with writing a lot of generic database code that runs on your production database, which might be MySQL, Postgres, etc. and at the same time it runs on sqlite for tests. It is not possible for every application out there to use 100% generic SQLAlchemy, since sqlite has some important differences with the others, but in many cases this works well.

So whenever possible, I set up a sqlite database for my tests. Even for large databases, using an in-memory sqlite database should be pretty fast. Another very fast alternative is to generate your tables once, make a backup of your sqlite file with all the emtpy tables, then before each test restore the file instead of doing a create_all().

I have not explored the idea of doing an initial backup of the database with empty tables and then use file based restores between tests for MySQL or Postgres, but in theory that should work as well, so I guess that is one solution you haven't mentioned in your list. You will need to stop and restart the db service in between your tests, though.