Difference between truncation, transaction and deletion database strategies

The database cleaning strategies refer to database terminology. I.e. those terms come from the (SQL) database world, so people generally familiar with database terminology will know what they mean.

The examples below refer to SQL definitions. DatabaseCleaner however supports other non-SQL types of databases too, but generally the definitions will be the same or similar.

Deletion

This means the database tables are cleaned using the SQL DELETE FROM statement. This is usually slower than truncation, but may have other advantages instead.

Truncation

This means the database tables are cleaned using the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. This will simply empty the table immediately, without deleting the table structure itself or deleting records individually.

Transaction

This means using BEGIN TRANSACTION statements coupled with ROLLBACK to roll back a sequence of previous database operations. Think of it as an "undo button" for databases. I would think this is the most frequently used cleaning method, and probably the fastest since changes need not be directly committed to the DB.

Example discussion: Rspec, Cucumber: best speed database clean strategy

Reason for truncation strategy with Capybara

The best explanation was found in the Capybara docs themselves:

# Transactional fixtures do not work with Selenium tests, because Capybara# uses a separate server thread, which the transactions would be hidden# from. We hence use DatabaseCleaner to truncate our test database.

Cleaning requirements

You do not necessarily have to clean your database after each test case. However you need to be aware of side effects this could have. I.e. if you create, modify, or delete some records in one step, will the other steps be affected by this?

Normally RSpec runs with transactional fixtures turned on, so you will never notice this when running RSpec - it will simply keep the database automatically clean for you:

https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/v/2-10/docs/transactions