Neon's Instant Branches: Schema-Only or With Data, the Choice Is Yours

If you’ve been keeping up with the Neon story, we introduced database branching in December 2022. Our instant branches—complete copies of production, including data and schema—have enabled thousands of developers to work and test efficiently within the safety of their own isolated environments.

Neon allows us to develop much faster than we’ve ever been used to. Instead of putting a lot of effort into getting a synthetic dataset within Docker or local Postgres, we just test in a Neon branch with a perfect copy of production data. — Alex Klarfeld, – CEO and co-founder of Supergood.a

The positive impact of branches on our customers’ workflows has been extraordinary. Building on this success, we’re thrilled to introduce instant schema-only branches for users in our Early Access Program, and spoiler alert: later this year, we plan to launch anonymized branching, enabling the anonymization of sensitive data whenever a new branch is created with data.