When Linus Torvalds designed Git, one of his famous quotes was “branching is not the problem, merging is”. Properly merging database schema changes along with code is even harder - especially if many teams and tons of data get involved. We will tell how those challenges got addressed at GitHub and how the same tooling found its way into PlanetScale’s database branching and merging workflow. We will do a live demo showing how to propose, test, approve and merge MySQL schema changes directly from a pull request along with the corresponding application code changes. If you create a free PlanetScale account, you can even follow along with a couple of clicks. You will also learn the story behind Vitess - the Open Source project invented by the founders of PlanetScale to reliably run MySQL at YouTube - now used in production environments at places like Slack, GitHub, Roblox and Twitter. Last but not least, there will be multiple opportunities to win some swag, so don’t miss the session.