Introducing Consort: Test-Driven Development on a Branching Database
Databricks, Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
Bringing TDD practice to data work by branching the database the way developers branch code.
This post introduces Consort, which applies test-driven development to data work by allowing the database itself to branch the way source code does.
The author frames it against 25 years of building software on Kent Beck's TDD and Martin Fowler's refactoring practices, noting that data engineering never inherited those disciplines because there was no cheap way to create an isolated environment to test against. Branching storage removes that obstacle.
For data teams whose testing consists of running pipelines against production copies, it is a meaningful change in what is practical.