---
title: 'Rethinking the database'
subtitle: "Discover how Neon's branching model transforms database workflows with instant, ephemeral environments"
updatedOn: '2025-07-08T12:47:21.296Z'
---

Neon replaces these outdated workflows with a more powerful model: ephemeral, on-demand environments backed by database branching.

Instead of creating and managing separate database instances for every task, teams work from a single source of truth (a production-like parent branch) and create lightweight, fully functional clones for development, testing, and preview workflows.

The result: faster development cycles, safer experimentation, and simpler infrastructure management.

<TestimonialsWrapper>

<Testimonial
text="We’re a small team, but we’re scaling quickly and doing a lot. We’re shipping multiple times a day — to do that, we need to test stuff quickly and merge to main very quickly as well. Neon branches are a game changer for this."
author={{
  name: 'Avi Romanoff',
  company: 'Founder at Magic Circle',
}}
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/>

<Testimonial
text="Neon’s branching paradigm has been great for us. It lets us create isolated environments without having to move huge amounts of data around. This has lightened the load on our ops team, now it’s effortless to spin up entire environments."
author={{
  name: 'Jonathan Reyes',
  company: 'Principal Engineer at Dispatch',
}}
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/>

<Testimonial
text="Developers already face significant delays when working on a PR — running CI tests, ensuring everything is ready for preview, it all adds up. Time to launch is crucial for us: when we tried Neon and saw that spinning up a new branch takes seconds, we were blown away."
author={{
  name: 'Alex Co',
  company: 'Head of Platform Engineering at Mindvalley',
}}
simpleMode
/>

</TestimonialsWrapper>