DBLab Engine

DBLab Engine is an open-source tool for cloning and branching PostgreSQL databases almost instantly. It creates thin clones of full-size databases, so teams can build dev, QA, and staging environments with production-like data and test database changes without large storage or time costs. It is written in Go and released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Typical uses include testing every database migration in CI/CD, giving developers temporary full-size clones for query analysis and optimization, and validating ideas from AI assistants against real data. The README gives an example in which cloning a 1 TiB database takes about ten seconds, and says dozens of independent clones can run on one machine.

It works with any PostgreSQL, including self-managed servers and managed services such as AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Supabase, and Timescale. For managed services where physical access is not possible, DBLab runs on a separate VM in the same region and refreshes its data automatically. It can be installed in any cloud or on premises and suits database engineers and platform teams.