Lakebase Postgres branch-based restores for fast recovery at scale

In managed OLTP, restores have always been painfully slow and they get slower at scale. This often means that large production databases, where downtime costs the most, are left waiting the longest to recover.

The usual workarounds are difficult, expensive and risky. They involve extra replicas, extra environments and even a DBA on the restore which doesn’t fully guarantee you will be protected. Failover to a healthy replica helps when a machine dies, but it does not help when the bad write is already on the standby. That still means a restore, and a restore can mean hours of downtime.