Tessera DB Tutorial: Branch Your Data Like You Branch Code

Starting from your main line, create a named branch and switch to it. From then on, any write you do lands on the branch, and reads see the branch's changes layered on top of the parent.

Insert experimental facts, adjust entities, whatever the experiment needs. When you reach a milestone, commit a versioned checkpoint with a message describing what changed — so you can come back to exactly this state later.

Diff the branch against its parent to see precisely which entities changed and how. This is your review step before deciding whether the experiment was worth keeping.

If the experiment worked, switch back to main, merge the branch's changes in, and delete the branch. If it didn't, just delete the branch — main was never touched.

Branching is a power tool — great for migrations, A/B tests, and exploratory work — but not a substitute for transactions. ACID guarantees apply to writes on the active branch, not to cross-branch operations.