- If you use xfs (+`file_copy_method=CLONE`) you can do this with Postgres 18.
`CREATE DATABASE clankerdb TEMPLATE sourcedb STRATEGY=FILE_COPY;`.
But Ardent can be useful for many, because cloud providers uses heavily restricted Postgres. And many use Aurora, which doesn't event let configure the `log_line_prefix`.
Though if cloud providers add file_copy_method=CLONE compatible managed pg ...
ref: https://boringsql.com/posts/instant-database-clones/
- “Never impacts production data” is impossible to guarantee. Playing with real world data often has side effects outside of the database. For example if you store oauth tokens to external services in your DB (customer integrations) it’s easy to mess up your customers data through a bad API call (been there done that).
There is still value in carefully testing on your prod DB, but for that you could just easily maintain a read replica. I don’t see the need for a SaaS here.
- Looks interesting, curious what your moat here is. What prevents Supabase/Neon from doing this? Actually don't they already do this? How does this differ from the branching Neon and Supabase already offer?
- Drop-the-database events occur whenever the review process is bypassed. It’s “Just run it; the agent wrote it” that undermines trust. The migration may be semantically correct yet practically incorrect, such as renaming a column to break a service that is in use or creating an index that locks the table during heavy use.
What Ardent does makes sense for a team setting where several agents/developers require their own environment before deploying code. But from a one-man-show founder’s perspective, the constraint is not about isolation but rather self-discipline.
- Hi, site looks beautiful!
How does this compare to managing our own read-only replica with anonymized data?
- How many people are giving an LLM Agent full read access to their production data? That seems nuts to me.
- Congrats on the launch! DB clones have been a game changer for my team, allowing us to build isolated workspaces for agents to do work ranging from optimizing queries/views to building UI/UX that works for the actually combinations of data we have.
We self-host DBLab since we had trouble getting Xata, Neon, and hosted DBLab configured.
by Jinyibruceli
1 subcomments
- I ran into this exact problem building browser automation agents that needed to test DB migrations. The real killer wasn't just getting a sandbox quickly, it was that reverting changes after a failed test would take forever with traditional backup/restore. One thing I'm curious about though - how do you handle agents that need to test against production data patterns but can't actually touch real user data? Do you have a synthetic data layer or is that on the user to solve?
- Doesn't look open-source. If you are interested in having a Neon or git-like branching for PostgreSQL experience, have a look at Xata, which is based on ZFS like Delphix was:
https://github.com/xataio/xata
- The concept is cool but what value are you adding ontop of the Neon Twin infra it’s built on? It seems the same can be done just using Neon directly for half the cost?
- Congrats on the launch!
One note on the pricing: it would kind of bum me out to pay $250/month for $100/month in credit.
That feels like I'm losing $150/month.
by debarshri
2 subcomments
- Does it clone the data? We have a table with 35GB data, what happen in that case?
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by Serhii-Set
0 subcomment
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by MehdiBelkacem
1 subcomments
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by kramit1288
0 subcomment
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