Testing NodeJS and SQL database integration

What would be the best practice setup for running tests that involved some integration of a NodeJS API and a database?

In addition to unit tests, it'd be great if I could seed the database with some dummy data and test various behaviors on this data.

In these cases is it best to have a test database sitting there solely for the purpose of testing? E.g. in AWS there'd be an RDS instance always on, that CI tools would point to and have permissions for.