Start a "throwaway" MySQL session for testing code?

If I want to be able to test my application against a empty MySQL database each time my application's testsuite is run, how can I start up a server as a non-root user which refers to a empty (not saved anywhere, or in saved to /tmp) MySQL database?

My application is in Pyth开发者_运维百科on, and I'm using unittest on Ubuntu 9.10.

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--datadir for just the data or --basedir

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You can try the Blackhole and Memory table types in MySQL.