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Clone

Instant Cloning

Piglet Run supports Copy-on-Write (CoW) cloning for rapid database forking.

How It Works

Copy-on-Write means:

  • Zero copy at clone time
  • Only changed blocks consume storage
  • TB-scale databases clone in milliseconds
Original Database
┌─────────────────────┐
│ Block A │ Block B │ Block C │
└────┬────┴────┬────┴────┬────┘
     │         │         │
     ▼         ▼         ▼
┌────────────────────────────┐
│      Shared Storage        │
└────────────────────────────┘
     ▲         ▲         ▲
     │         │         │
┌────┴────┬────┴────┬────┴────┐
│ Block A │ Block B │ Block C │ (shared)
│         │ Block B'│         │ (changed in clone)
└─────────┴─────────┴─────────┘
Cloned Database

Use Cases

Use Case Benefit
Development Clone prod for testing
AI Experiments Branch for each experiment
Feature Branches Database per branch
Training Each learner gets own copy

Database Cloning

Using PostgreSQL utilities:

# Create database from template
pig pg psql -c "CREATE DATABASE dev TEMPLATE prod"

# Or using pg_dump/pg_restore for cross-server clone
pg_dump -Fc prod > prod.dump
pg_restore -d dev prod.dump

Using pgBackRest for Cloning 

# Restore to a new cluster as a clone
pig pb restore --target-pgdata=/data/pg-clone

# Or restore to specific time point
pig pb restore -t "2025-01-29 10:00:00" --target-pgdata=/data/pg-clone

Filesystem Cloning with JuiceFS 

# Clone directory using JuiceFS snapshot
juicefs snapshot create /jfs/workspace ws-snapshot
juicefs snapshot restore /jfs/workspace-clone ws-snapshot

Next Steps