fix(shared): let ArchivedMemories create its own table, and stop the test leaking

[Cipher208]

test_archived_memories failed with no such table: archived_memories when run alone, and passed when another test had migrated the shared session database first. A test that needs a neighbour to pass is testing the neighbour, not the class.

Two separate defects, one on each side.

The test wrote to the real memory directory

It built ArchivedMemories() with no connection manager, so it used the global one — and before hermetic_global_db existed (90c9149, 2026-08-24) that was the live data dir.

The evidence is still on disk: ~/.mcp-ariel-memory/memory.db holds 32 rows with user_id='test_sh', all of them from 2026-08-24 — the day the fixture landed. The fixture stopped further writes; it did not clean up the ones already there.

The test now takes its own manager on tmp_path, like its neighbour tests/test_shared/test_connection.py already did. test_dream_buffer and test_embedding_cache are given the same treatment: neither of them ever checked a global property either, and test_sh is the marker both of them use.

The class assumed its table already existed

archive() and get_archived() went straight to SELECT, while the table is created by _init_db() — and in production by the Alembic migration. On a migrated database it worked, which is exactly what hid the problem.

DreamBuffer solved the identical problem already, with an idempotent ensure() guarded by _ready and called from each method that touches the table. ArchivedMemories now does the same, with the same shape and for the same reason. The schema in _init_db matches the migration's definition exactly, so no new migration is needed.

This was reachable outside tests, not just inside them: four production call sites construct ArchivedMemories and never run migrations — core/episodic.py, lifecycle/forgetting.py, rag/conflict.py, mcp_server/tools/primitives/forget.py. Two others (features/compression.py, forget.py) called _init_db() by hand before archive(); those calls stay, now simply redundant rather than load-bearing.

Tests

• Each of the six tests in the file passes alone — previously one failed alone.
• One new test covers the class on an already-migrated database.
• Full suite: 2087 passed.
• The real memory directory was verified untouched: 32 rows, last write 2026-08-24 14:09:12, mtime unchanged.

[coderabbitai]

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