24.0k stars · Apache-2.0 · v2.3.5 (2026-09-16), read from /releases/latest; the yearless '16 Sep' resolves to 2026 because it is in the past. ungh.cc's cached copy was OLDER, showing v2.2.3 of 2026-07-30 and pushedAt 2026-07-24, so GitHub's own page was taken as newer · Track this in Scout
A SQL database you can branch, commit, compare and merge like a code repository.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A database that speaks the MySQL protocol, so most existing tools and libraries connect to it unchanged. Version control is exposed as SQL: there are system tables you can query for history and stored procedures for commit, branch, merge and reset.
What it is good for. Data that people edit by hand and argue about afterwards: price lists, mapping tables, configuration, reference data, a dataset several people maintain together. In an ordinary database the question "what changed last week and who changed it" has no answer unless somebody built an audit system in advance. Here it is one query. It is also a good fit for data shipped alongside code, because a change to the data can be reviewed the same way a change to the code is reviewed, before it is merged.
- Apache-2.0 and a single program to install, with no cluster and no extra services.
- MySQL-compatible up to MySQL 8.4, so an existing application can often point at it with only a connection string change.
- The version-control features are real database features, not a wrapper: branching and merging happen inside the engine.
- It is slower than MySQL on some operations. The project publishes its own benchmark table with every release, which is honest and also means you should read it.
- Version control on data is a habit, not a switch. If nobody commits, you have an ordinary database with extra commands.
- Merging data has conflicts just as merging code does, and resolving them is a job somebody has to understand.
- treeverse/lakeFS
It brings the same branch-and-merge idea to files in object storage rather than to rows in a database.
Track this in Scout - TerminusDB/terminusdb
It also offers versioned, collaborative data, but it is a document and graph database with its own query language rather than a MySQL-compatible one.
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sudo bash -c 'curl -L https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash' mkdir mydata && cd mydata dolt init dolt sql -q "CREATE TABLE prices (sku VARCHAR(16) PRIMARY KEY, amount INT)" dolt commit -Am "first version"
