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There are tools for Postgres unit testing https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Test_Frameworks. Which is not to say there isn’t any room for improving them.

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Write more Postgres functions to unit test Postgres functions. :))

Isn't that normally the premise of testing? Eg writing Python functions to test other Python functions?

Yes but Python is nice to write. Postgres functions are not. At least not to me.

Depending on what kind of deployment you have, you could use Tcl, Rust, or even Python if you could use untrusted extensions. (Not a comment on this particularly testing framework, but Postgres server-side programming more generally.)

But I hear you, PgSQL can be very annoying and unergonomic, and it's not a language most people you're hiring will know upfront. Pushing things onto the backend isn't unreasonable. When I write tests for PgSQL, I write them in Python and run them from the client side, not on the server.

pl/pgSQL is very good (and ergonomic) for a logical extension to SQL, aka set theory programming with intermediate state. It isn't and was never targeted toward general purpose programming like Python.

That said, 100% agree that unit tests should live outside the DB. Querying for sets inside or outside makes no functional difference, and your DB doesn't need all that extra cruft.

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