Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast

peterldowns 19 points 2 comments July 30, 2026
brandur.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (2 comments)

lukasschwab

> I’m going to add a recommendation in our docs for pgtestdb, particularly for users aiming to test end-to-end (i.e. job inserted by client → fully completed by worker). That's exactly what I did to learn River — implementing simple apps and testing their execution with pgtestdb: https://github.com/lukasschwab/river-playground The starter skeleton was LLM-generated and not quite perfect, but discovering the coding agent's mistakes was satisfying in its own right.

peterldowns

Just want to say thank you to Brandur for doing such a cool experiment. Last year I actually explored the River test suite to understand how they made it work so quickly — he's understating it when he says their implementation is "gold standard." I'm both surprised and excited to hear that pgtestdb, out of the box, can give anyone a ~nearly as fast experience. Going to have to throw some tokens at pooling... very interesting idea. Thank you, Brandur!

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