How do you effectively develop if you can't reliably talk to the DB in dev due to configuration, system updates, security, schema changes, and a myriad of other

How do you effectively develop if you can't reliably talk to the DB in dev due to configuration, system updates, security, schema changes, and a myriad of other time-consuming hard to diagnose problems? > In the abstract I'm not sure what a test that talks to the database is actually testing. Well, presumably the reason that you have a DB in the first place is that your application requires a DB for some of its functionality. So how do you make sure this functionality works if you don't talk to the DB? Don't get me wrong -- I love that you refuse to accept ridiculously slow tests and enforce a 100ms deadline; I wish everything I was working on had the same approach. But unless you have some specific requirements (like talking to a proprietary cloud DB), you should maybe investigate if you might not have to accept slow and flaky DBs in dev or CI either. My experience is you don't.