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Database Branching

With Tigris, you can branch your database schema like you branch repositories in Git. As a result, you can have multiple isolated copies of your database schema to develop and test your features. Additionally, you can have your CI/CD pipelines use isolated database branches for execution without any overhead of setting up and maintaining a development database.

Branch​

Just like a Git repo, your Tigris database always defaults to the main branch as the primary source of data and schema. The main branch is created by default in your Tigris Project's database, and you cannot delete it. All new branches are created from main branch. A new branch is essentially an isolated copy-on-write clone of the schema on the main branch at the creation time i.e. all the collection schemas on main are copied over to the new branch upon creation.

note

When a database branch is created, only the collection schemas are copied from main to the new branch. The collections in the newly created branch will not have any documents by default.

A database branch can evolve its schema and data independently. You can have any number of branches, and creating a branch does not increase the load on the main branch, so you can quickly branch your database for development, staging, testing, and to segregate data for CI/CD pipelines.

Branching

Workflows​

Let's see how you can use the database branching feature in common development workflows:

Development​

Tigris follows a code-first approach, which means you model the schema in your codebase. First, you create a new branch for your database right from your code and seed it with data. When you do this, you copy all the collection schemas from main over to the new branch. This way, each developer in your team can have their own functional copy of code and database to work on.

This approach comes with the following benefits:

  1. You can add build-time hooks to your projects to ensure that your database branch is in sync with the models in your codebase. For an example with TypeScript, see automating your development workflow.
  2. When you merge your code, you also merge the database schema. Then, running the build step from 1. ensures the current branch receives all the required schema changes.

Staging​

Teams maintaining a separate staging or pre-production environment can have a CD pipeline apply the schema changes to a dedicated staging branch.

Testing​

You can use the Tigris APIs to automate the creation and deletion of database branches. Thus, you can ensure that each test running in parallel on the CI pipeline executes on its own copy of the data.

Next steps​

Check out the language-specific reference section to learn more about using database branching in your favorite language: