DBLab Engine on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Overview

DBLab Engine takes a snapshot of a PostgreSQL database and then hands out thin clones of it: full size, fully writable PostgreSQL instances that are created in seconds and cost almost nothing on disk, because each clone shares its unchanged blocks with the snapshot and stores only what you modify. A migration can be rehearsed against real data and thrown away, a slow query can be tuned against a real plan on a real dataset, and every engineer or continuous integration job can hold a private copy of a database that would be far too large to duplicate conventionally.

This image is a complete branching appliance rather than a bare engine: the engine and its REST API, the Community Edition web interface, a copy on write pool on a dedicated volume, and a bundled source database so the appliance can clone something real from the moment it starts. Clone lifecycle is driven from the web interface or the API, and the engine can be repointed at your own PostgreSQL server by editing configuration alone.

Common uses

• Give every engineer a private, full size copy of a production scale database
• Rehearse schema migrations and destructive changes against real data, then discard
• Run continuous integration and query tuning against realistic datasets, not fixtures

See it running

Real screenshots taken while testing this image against its deployment guide.