Differential storage for DuckDB

Snapshots, time travel and writable branches for pipelines, experiments, reproducible reports and more. A data import needs validation. A report needs last month’s numbers. A migration needs realistic test data. An analyst wants to compare two transformations, and an agent needs somewhere to try its own. These workflows share a requirement: keep a known database state, then inspect it or work independently from it. I built duckdb-differential to make that available directly from SQL. It adds snapshots, time travel, writable branches, clones and restore to native DuckDB databases. Versions share unchanged data. Everything works locally; optional S3 publication lets other machines query a retained version or recover it into a writable database. The extension is experimental, targeting DuckDB 1.5.6 on Linux and macOS. Let’s walk through several uses with one small database. Run the local examples in order in the same session, using an unused absolute directory for the repository: INSTALL…