The cost of experimentation determines the pace of innovation. In database development, this cost has traditionally been measured in hours and thousands of dollars per environment. DBLab Engine 4.0 changes this equation fundamentally with instant database branching.

New version delivers comprehensive database branching for Postgres with unique set of characteristics:

• Git-like semantics: branches are named pointers to snapshots
• O(1) scaling for both storage and compute costs
• True open source (Apache 2.0 license)

DBLab Engine version 3.4, an open-source tool for PostgreSQL thin cloning and database branching, has been released with numerous improvements.

Rapid, cost-effective cloning and branching are extremely valuable when you need to enhance the development process. DBLab Engine can handle numerous independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automated process can work with their own database created within seconds without additional expenses. This enables testing of any changes and optimization concepts, whether manually or in CI/CD pipelines, as well as validating all the concepts suggested by ChatGPT or another LLM. This effectively addresses the issue of LLM hallucinations.

The Postgres.ai team is happy to announce the release of version 3.2 of Database Lab Engine (DLE), an open-source tool that provides blazing-fast database cloning and branching for any PostgreSQL database to build powerful development, test, QA, and staging environments.

Database Lab Engine is an open-source technology that enables thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.

I'm very pleased to announce the very first preview version of Database Lab Engine (DLE) for AWS Marketplace. If you're using AWS, this is the fastest way to have powerful database branching for any database, including RDS and RDS Aurora. But not only RDS: any Postgres and Postgres-compatible database is supported as a source for DLE.

Now, for a fixed price (paying just for one EC2 instance and an EBS volume), you can have dozens of DB clones being provisioned in seconds and delivering independent databases for your Git branches, CI/CD pipelines, as well as manual optimization and testing activities.

The Postgres.ai team is happy to announce the release of version 3.1 of Database Lab Engine (DLE), the most advanced open-source software ever released that empowers development, testing, and troubleshooting environments for fast-growing projects. The use of Database Lab Engine 3.1 provides a competitive advantage to companies via implementing the "Shift-left testing" approach in software development.

Database Lab Engine is an open-source technology that enables thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.

What's new in DLE 3.0?

The Postgres.ai team is happy to announce the release of version 3.0 of Database Lab Engine (DLE), the most advanced open-source software ever released that empowers development, testing, and troubleshooting environments for fast-growing projects. The use of Database Lab Engine 3.0 provides a competitive advantage to companies via implementing the "Shift-left testing" approach in software development.

Database Lab Engine is an open-source technology that enables thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their very own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.

Among major changes in DLE 3.0:

• UI included to the core, it allows working with a single DLE instance,
• persistent clones: clones now survive DLE (or VM) restart,
• for the "logical" data provisioning mode: the ability to switch reset clone's state using a snapshot from different pool/dataset,
• better logging and configuration simplicity,
• improvements for the cases when multiple DLEs are running on a single machine,
• PostgreSQL 14 support.

Starting with version 3.0.0, DLE collects non-personally identifiable telemetry data. This feature is enabled by default but can be switched off. Read more in the DLE documentation. Keeping telemetry enabled can be considered your contribution to the DLE development because it helps make decisions down the road of the open-source product development.

Further, we discuss the most requested changes that were implemented in DLE 3.0 – all of them were created based on real-life user experience and invaluable feedback from the growing community of users and contributors.

The Database Lab Engine (DLE) is an open-source technology that enables thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.

DLE 2.5 significantly expands the capabilities of automatic preparation of snapshots directly from managed database services, as well as from logical dumps, namely:

• restoring of multiple databases
• various pg_dump output formats and file compression formats

Since version 2.5, it becomes possible to reset the clone's database state to a specific snapshot if multiple snapshots are available. See DLE CLI reference. There is also a new option for the reset command, --latest, that allows resetting to the latest available state not knowing the snapshot name. This can be very useful in situations when a clone lives long, occupying a specific port, and some applications (e.g., analytical tools) are configured to work with it – users can periodically switch to the freshest database state without a need to reconfigure their applications.

All new restore features are also already available in the Terraform module (currently works with AWS only).

Additionally, this release has a lot of improvements and fixes. Read the full changelog.

Database Lab Engine 2.4 is out​

The Database Lab Engine (DLE) is an open-source technology to enable thin cloning for PostgreSQL. Thin clones are exceptionally useful when you need to scale the development process. DLE can manage dozens of an independent clones of your database on a single machine, so each engineer or automation process works with their own database provisioned in seconds without extra costs.

DLE 2.4 brings two major capabilities to those who are interested in working with PostgreSQL thin clones:

• a new component, DB Migration Checker, that automates DB migration testing in CI/CD pipelines
• a Terraform module to deploy DLE in AWS using the "logical" provisioning mode

Additionally, this release has a lot of improvements and fixes.

About Database Lab Engine​

The Database Lab Engine (DLE) is an open-source experimentation platform for PostgreSQL databases. The DLE instantly creates full-size thin clones of your production database which you can use to:

1. Test database migrations
2. Optimize SQL queries
3. Deploy full-size staging applications

The Database Lab Engine can generate thin clones for any size database, eliminating the hours (or days!) required to create “thick” database copies using conventional methods. Thin clones are independent, fully writable, and will behave identically to production: they will have the same data and will generate the same query plans.

Learn more about the Database Lab Engine and sign up for an account at https://postgres.ai/.

Database Lab Engine 2.2.0​

Database Lab Engine (DLE) 2.2.0 further improves support for both types of PostgreSQL data directory initialization and synchronization: “physical” and “logical”. Particularly, for the “logical” type (which is useful for managed cloud PostgreSQL such as Amazon RDS users), it is now possible to setup multiple disks or disk arrays and automate data retrieval on a schedule. This gracefully cleans up the oldest versions of data, without downtime or interruptions in the lifecycle of clones.

Database Lab Engine 2.1 for PostgreSQL released​

We are happy to announce version 2.1.0 of Database Lab Engine (DLE), an open-source tool for building powerful development and testing environments based on thin cloning of PostgreSQL databases. Using Database Lab API or CLI (and if you are using Database Lab SaaS, GUI), on a single machine with, say, a 1 TiB disk, you can easily create and destroy dozens of database copies of size 1 TiB each. All these copies are independently modifiable and created/destroyed in just a few seconds. This can become a game-changer in your development and testing workflow, improving time-to-market, and reducing costs of your non-production infrastructure.

In 2.1, the main new features are:

• Better data protection and security:
  • robust configuration defining how data is patched when snapshots are automatically created (both shell and SQL scripts are now supported),
  • an option specifying whether or not passwords for the existing DB users need to be preserved.
• [experimental] DLE API and the CLI tool are extended to have a new feature: "CI Observer" helping control DB schema changes (DB migrations) — here is the reference on how to use it https://postgres.ai/docs/reference-guides/dblab-client-cli-reference#subcommand-start-observation. This is a small step towards the big goal: have 100% coverage for testing DB migrations in CI using full-sized thin clones. Watch the demo (turn captions on):