Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if database branching was easy?

xata.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#41

Post by tee-es-gee »

sastraxi wrote: post #35
tee-es-gee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context for the others, I think you are referring to this blog post: https://xata.io/blog/open-source-postgres-branching-copy-on-... (in particular the "The key is in the storage system" section) right? What I'm saying there is that if you do Postgres with on top of a local ZFS volume, the child branches Postgres instances need to be on the same server. So you are limited in how many branches you can do. One or t…

Yes, that's what I'm referring to. You're still making the assumption in this comment: why does my 2nd (cloned) database need a separate postgres instance? One postgres server can host multiple databases.

Got it, yes, I've seen in the other comment that you're referring to the new Postgres 18 feature. If that works for you in local dev, so much the better :)

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#44

Post by zachmu »

bhouston wrote: post #18

I have tried this before: https://www.dolthub.com/ It was a lot of work and had poor performance with a lot of complications. I am not using it in my latest projects as a result.

Can you be more specific about what complications you ran into? As for performance, Dolt is faster overall than MySQL on sysbench now.

https://docs.dolthub.com/sql-reference/benchmarks/latency

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#45

Post by zachmu »

mwexler wrote: post #15

I thought this was a repost but I was thinking of dolt which has similar capabilities but a different approach. As in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109880

Neon is basically this same idea: postgres on a copy-on-write file system.

These aren't really "branches" though, they're hard forks. You can't merge them back after making changes. Dolt is still the only SQL database with branch and merge.

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#47

Post by condwanaland »

This is something that Palantir Foundry supports extremely well. Its data layer is built around the idea that anytime you're making a change, you make a branch, build on branch, only data you modified is copied to the branch, and then you can test it end to end on the branch.

Can't imagine doing it any other way

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#48

Post by SkyPuncher »

I actually just did this recently. I looked at a bunch of solutions for my dev environment, but Claude kept pushing me back to a really simple one: use Postgres.

Postgres has template database that effectively give you a really easy means of "cloning" a database. On AFS (and several other file systems), copy-on-write is pretty much native.

Re: What if database branching was easy?

#49

Post by gonzalohm »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #48

I actually just did this recently. I looked at a bunch of solutions for my dev environment, but Claude kept pushing me back to a really simple one: use Postgres. Postgres has template database that effectively give you a really easy means of "cloning" a database. On AFS (and several other file systems), copy-on-write is pretty much native.

I was also looking into this for dev environments but I haven't been able to solve "rebases". If someone merges to prod then the dev environment is "out of sync" and you have to clone the DB again. It's pretty painful to orchestrate
Post reply on HN