Neon Serverless Postgres

Why Neon

Neon gives you a fully managed serverless Postgres with instant branching. Every preview deploy gets its own isolated database branch — no migration collisions, no shared state between environments. The pooled connection string keeps Vercel serverless functions from exhausting connections under load.

Grab your connection string

1. Create a project at neon.tech.
2. Open the Dashboard tab and copy the Pooled connection string.
3. It looks like postgresql://user:pass@ep-xyz-pooler.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/db?sslmode=require

Wire it into Meridian

Paste the pooled connection string into your Vercel environment variables as DATABASE_URL. Meridian's Prisma client picks it up automatically — no config changes needed.

# .env (or Vercel env vars)
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:pass@ep-xyz-pooler.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/db?sslmode=require"

# Optional: direct (non-pooled) for migrations
DIRECT_URL="postgresql://user:pass@ep-xyz.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/db?sslmode=require"

Run migrations

Push your schema to the Neon branch with a single command. Meridian uses Prisma Migrate under the hood.

npx prisma migrate deploy

Branching for preview deploys

Neon branches are copy-on-write clones that spin up in under a second. For each Vercel preview deployment, create a branch and set its connection string as the preview env var. When the preview is torn down, delete the branch. Your production data stays untouched.