Introducing the latest in Postgres for agentic workloads. Agents can now branch or wake your Postgres database instantly.

like git for postgres databases?

scary

Scale to 0 is nice. But I don't see the need to git branch a postgres. And this would need to be integrated into cnpg to be useful. I'm not clicking buttons in a UI

This was made possible with two new features of the Xata platform: the new Xatastor storage engine and warm compute pools. Xatastor separates compute from storage and branches are copy-on-write: they share the parent's data and stores only the changes to the parent. Warm pools keep Postgres clusters ready, so a branch is ready to use in about a second.

This makes your branches truly ephemeral. Cloning a big Postgres for every test or agent run is slow and expensive, which is why so many teams rely on shared staging databases. Now every PR, CI job, and agent task can have its own isolated Postgres. When things go sideways, just delete and start again.

opens 30-40 PRs a day, each getting an isolated branch. branches on every agent run and every CI build, averaging more than 270 branches per team member. Each branch is full Postgres, isolating agents from Prod.

With Xata, you are only billed for the minutes a branch is awake, and you only pay for your data once. Copies are free thanks to Copy-on-Write. For many of our customers, five minutes is the median lifespan of a branch. Five minutes on a xata.micro branch costs $0.001.

1000 pure vanilla Postgres databases for $1. No fork, no proprietary APIs, every extension already works. You can get started for free at The full write-up:

Pretty cool