The original headline is "How a Single beforeEach Killed Our CI for 36 Hours"

Short summary

A single beforeEach hook that truncated all 76 tables before each of 1,140 tests caused 86,640 TRUNCATE CASCADE operations, hanging CI for 36 hours. The fix replaced per-test truncation with beforeAll schema sync plus unique test data using timestamps/random suffixes, reducing suite runtime from 6+ hours to ~3 minutes. The article also covers transaction-rollback isolation as an alternative and the importance of setting explicit CI timeouts.

• •beforeEach TRUNCATE on 76 tables × 1,140 tests = 86,640 operations caused CI timeout
• •Fix: beforeAll sync + unique test data (timestamps/UUIDs) instead of per-test cleanup
• •Suite dropped from 6+ hours to ~3 minutes; set explicit CI step timeouts

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