At work I’m currently developing software which is supposed to run on openSUSE. I need to query the package database at some point which of course does not exist on my ubuntu machine. Here’s a quick setup how to create a fake local RPM database:

echo "%_dbpath /home/user/rpmdb" >> ~/.rpmmacros
mkdir /home/user/rpmdb
rpm -i --nodeps --justdb --force-debian *.rpm

And that’s it.