But yea, DELETEing is faster than creating a DB from template (depends on how much you have to delete, of course). However, templates allow parallelism by giving its test its own database. I ended up doing a mix of both: create a DB if there's not one available, or reuse one if available, always tearing down data.
TRUNCATE is faster than DELETE. You could have 100 dbs, each test first acquires one, runs, truncates, releases. No need to create more dbs on the fly.
But yea, DELETEing is faster than creating a DB from template (depends on how much you have to delete, of course). However, templates allow parallelism by giving its test its own database. I ended up doing a mix of both: create a DB if there's not one available, or reuse one if available, always tearing down data.