Simple 'database cleaner' approach using `config.around`. Was able to cut down some seconds out of the suite. Thanks to @brandonhilkert

spec_helper.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.around do |example|
    # For examples using capybara-webkit for example.
    # Remove this if you don't use it or anything similar
    if example.metadata[:js]
      example.run

      ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("TRUNCATE #{ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.join(',')} RESTART IDENTITY")
    else
      ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
        example.run
        raise ActiveRecord::Rollback
      end
    end
  end
end

Just a note that the speed bump you're getting here is less from not loading database_cleaner and more from the fact that you're only truncating on :js examples. You can do the same thing with a specific database cleaner configuration. So you can get a database agnostic cleaning approach and a pretty fast suite in the same solution.

@jfelchner you're right, I just found myself not in need of using it on projects that has one required database (so I don't need to be agnostic), but for sure it's quite helpful. It was a bit of an overhead to have database_cleaner imo.

I saw a dramatic improvement in the test suite I'm working with... When I mean dramatic, I mean 8 minutes to 27 seconds...

I'm running jruby 1.7.4 (1.9.3p392) 2013-05-16 2390d3b on Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_51-b11-457-11M4509 [darwin-x86_64]