Thank you for this clarification. I don't know who came up with the idea that unit tests must not hit the database (it wasn't DHH). The result was that many 'mocked' unit tests merely tested their own mocks and stubs. I work on a server-side db-centric code base and many (i.e. the most important)of my unit tests involve database round trips. Speed of execution isn't a real problem in this case.