Comment by vc289

We've got docs on how we did it :)

https://docs.tryardent.com/architecture

But essentially we get around the restrictions of the original DB by replicating into a different postgres compatible DB that essentially serves as a read replica. That DB is the one that branches but since it mirrors the original DB you get effective clones

By doing this we get a lot more control over what we can do to create the clones. The read replica clones using copy on write + isolated autoscaling compute to clone in 6s. We use neon to do this since we think they've implemented those two properties well.

Since it's default postgres logical replication + DDL triggers you can technically point it at any "branching enabled" db on the other end in order to achieve the same effect