[moshmosh]

It's a hosted DB, and as far as I can tell the Killer Feature is that it makes schema updates less painful. How it does that without significant performance trade-offs or caps is unclear to me.

[EDIT] on reading further in their docs, my suspicion is that their "branching" concept is a hell of a lot more limited than I believed at first. I initially took it to mean you could have multiple active schemas working on your data at once—instead, I think it's more like exporting just the schema of your DB and importing it to a fresh DB, which is nothing new and doesn't run into all kinds of operational and security issues the other workflow would. I'm fairly sure all the actual magic is in the schema diffing, and the docs make me think even that isn't as fully-magical as one might hope.

[lizztheblizz]

It's closer to your original assumption than your second. Branching relies on vreplication, and it does actually allow you to develop multiple versions of your schema against your full production dataset. The "magic" is a powerful materialization engine that allows every branch to maintain its own version, and it _does_ allow you to work with your actual data. This is just scratching the surface of what that can do, though. We have loads more features cooking. :)