Database branching: Overcoming the bottlenecks of shared database environments

Database branching has, for a long time, been a troublesome piece in the modern developer workflow puzzle: a good idea in principle but in practice a slow and often expensive challenge. Get it right and you can accelerate productivity and remove bottlenecks; get it wrong and you're potentially creating all sorts of trouble for yourself, from privacy risks to additional complexity. However, things are changing. Thanks to the emergence of new platforms such as Neon, Supabase and Databricks Lakebase, branching a database can become as familiar to developers as managing code branches and multiple environments with, say...