Database / Supabase Intermediate to Advanced Interview Questions
When would you choose a preview branch over testing migrations directly in staging?
A shared staging project is a single, persistent environment that every developer's in-flight work competes for, so testing a migration there risks colliding with someone else's half-finished schema change or leaving staging in a broken state for the team.
A preview branch makes sense specifically when a migration is risky, exploratory, or still being iterated on — it gives one developer or one PR a disposable environment to break, roll back, and retry without affecting anyone else, and it can be torn down the moment the PR merges or closes. Staging still earns its place as the final, shared checkpoint that mirrors production configuration closely enough to catch integration issues a solo branch wouldn't surface, such as how a new migration interacts with other recently merged changes.
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