Tests fail when executed from maven but not from Intellij

The problem was with a library I was using. Since I had the library project loaded into IntelliJ, when I ran the tests manually, the library code was being used. But Maven used the library from the .m2 repository, which didn't have the .jar up to date. This out of date jar had something that was causing the creation of the table EngineConfigs to fail. In case anyone is facing the same problem, a useful trick is to remove the ":mem" from the database connection URL and inspect the *.trace.db file that is generated when running the tests. That trace file will give you information about the real underlying issue.

In my case the problem was actually about running tests in parallel vs serially, but I thought it was a Maven/IntelliJ difference because in IntelliJ the interface made it easiest to debug one test at a time, and the mvn command made it easy to run all the tests at once. Once I used remote debugging of the test in Maven, it passed, so then I thought it was a "debug" vs "run" difference, and then I remembered I had turned on JUnit parallel test execution and had a race condition in my tests with Mockito.

FWIW, something else to look at is the Java version used as the "Project SDK" in Intellij vs the Java version you are using in the CLI/shell. For me the project was using 1.8, the shell was using 14. Everything was fine running install from the Maven plugin, but some tests were failing in the shell. I pointed JAVA_HOME to JDK 8 and the tests all passed.