Ephemeral Postgres Databases

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Another approach is to use Database Lab (https://gitlab.com/postgres-ai/database-lab). Our tool allows deploying disposable Postgres databases in seconds using REST API, CLI, or GUI. The difference is that we provide clones with snapshots of full-sized data. For example, you may have dozens of clones of your production databases (with masked sensitive data) to use as staging servers, database migration verification, tests, and all that provisioned in a couple of seconds.

    More about using full-sized Postgres clones for migration testing and why is that important: https://postgres.ai/products/database-migration-testing

  • ephemeralpg

    Quickly spin up a temporary PostgreSQL test databases

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • dockertest

    Write better integration tests! Dockertest helps you boot up ephermal docker images for your Go tests with minimal work.

    I use https://github.com/ory/dockertest for my Golang services that need testing. One thing that is nice is I can easily switch out/test both postgresql and cockroachdb.

  • embedded-postgres-binaries

    Lightweight bundles of PostgreSQL binaries with reduced size intended for testing purposes.

  • steampipe

    Zero-ETL, infinite possibilities. Live query APIs, code & more with SQL. No DB required.

    Steampipe [1] is an open source CLI to query cloud APIs (e.g. AWS, GitHub, Kubernetes) with SQL. It uses an embedded Postgres instance internally and is built with Foreign Data Wrappers.

    We install and leverage the Zonky Embedded Postgres Binaries [2] which are normally used for test suites. They have been great for us.

    It's amazing how fast and light Postgres runs for these use cases!

    1 - https://steampipe.io

  • tempgres-server

    REST service for creating temporary PostgreSQL databases

    (Shameless plug:)

    Here's the same thing as a docker container you can just keep around which auto-destroys the databases after a set time: https://github.com/ClockworkConsulting/tempgres-server

    A docker container is on dockerhub as 'cwconsult/tempgres:v2.1.1' (I think I messed up the last publishing and 'latest' doesn't point to that. I should really fix that tag.)

    A few nice things about this one is that:

    - You don't even need a local PostgreSQL

    - You can keep one somewhere in your LAN and never have to worry about it again.

    - It integrates trivially with GitLab CI where you just use it as a service inside the build.

    - Integration super-simple... simple enough to use even in e.g. shell scripts.

    - No need to worry about tear-down

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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