The one thing I greatly appreciate about Rspec (in RoR apps) is its ability to fully test the data layer. I maintain several such apps and database mocks are completely unnecessary, even going so far as to doing complete db setup and teardown between cases. Other apps I work on don’t really have this paradigm, so we resort to a combination of unit testing (JUnit) — which does involve significant mocking — and behavioral testing (Selenium) which of course indirectly tests database interaction. In the end, both methods accomplish the same goal of database testing but ideally you want “all of the above” to uncover edge cases, especially with critical infrastructure apps.
