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Can Rails' test environment tell MySQL to be memory-only?

When I'm running my Rails rspec tests, there is a lot of interaction with the database. This is slow.

I know that the best advice to speed up testing is "reduce your database interactions". But I also wondered if I can make MySQL behave differently. The test data typically only needs to exist for a fraction of a second at a time, so there should never be much of it.

Can I tell MySQL not to write to the hard disk? Can I limit this behavior to my Rails development environment (maybe I need a separate install of MySQL server)?