On: Neon Serverless Postgres is generally available

[leftcenterright]

Calling it "branches" does seem misleading. For instance, would this also work across major PG versions? afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es

[mattashii → leftcenterright]

> Calling it "branches" does seem misleading.

Branching in Neon should be interpreted more like the branches seen in graph theory's trees rather than the featureset exposed by git: the whole history of a Neon project is a unidirected graph with a single path between any two points in the history.

> For instance, would this also work across major PG versions

As for multiple major versions: We currently can handle multiple major versions in different tenants on the same pageserver/safekeeper servers, just not for the user's PostgreSQL instance. Major version upgrades (by way of pg_upgrade) are something we're working on, but that's still quite far down the road.

> afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es

Correct, and AFAIK we don't actually advertise anything related to merging histories. If we do, please do tell where, so we can correct that.

[vendiddy → leftcenterright]

We use NeonDB in production and I the use of the term "branching" intuitive.

We can branch off the main database to test things out, and periodically reset the branch to its parent.

There are some points where the analogy doesn't quite work, but what should they call it instead?