This is really cool and I love to see the interest in fast clones / branching here.
We've built Xata with this idea of using copy-on-write database branching for staging and testing setups, where you need to use testing data that's close to the real data. On top of just branching, we also do things like anonymization and scale-to-zero, so the dev branches are often really cheap. Check it out at https://xata.io/
> The source database can't have any active connections during cloning. This is a PostgreSQL limitation, not a filesystem one. For production use, this usually means you create a dedicated template database rather than cloning your live database directly.
This is a key limitation to be aware of. A way to workaround it could be to use pgstream (https://github.com/xataio/pgstream) to copy from the production database to a production replica. Pgstream can also do anonymization on the way, this is what we use at Xata.
We've built Xata with this idea of using copy-on-write database branching for staging and testing setups, where you need to use testing data that's close to the real data. On top of just branching, we also do things like anonymization and scale-to-zero, so the dev branches are often really cheap. Check it out at https://xata.io/
> The source database can't have any active connections during cloning. This is a PostgreSQL limitation, not a filesystem one. For production use, this usually means you create a dedicated template database rather than cloning your live database directly.
This is a key limitation to be aware of. A way to workaround it could be to use pgstream (https://github.com/xataio/pgstream) to copy from the production database to a production replica. Pgstream can also do anonymization on the way, this is what we use at Xata.