doltlite-driver

DoltLite for Go: SQLite with Git-style version control — branch, commit, merge, and diff your relational data, exposed as a database/sql driver. The engine is compiled into the package from a vendored amalgamation, so there is no system library to install.

Install

go get github.com/dolthub/doltlite-driver

Requires cgo (CGO_ENABLED=1, the default when a C compiler is present) and zlib. The first build compiles the engine and is then cached.

Development snapshots built from DoltLite's master branch are available on the driver's dev branch:

go get github.com/dolthub/doltlite-driver@dev

Go records an immutable pseudo-version in go.mod. Run the command again to advance to a newer snapshot, and commit the resulting go.mod and go.sum changes before deploying.

Use

import (
    "database/sql"
    _ "github.com/dolthub/doltlite-driver"
)

db, err := sql.Open("doltlite", "app.db")
if err != nil { return err }
defer db.Close()

if _, err := db.Exec(`CREATE TABLE users(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT)`); err != nil {
    return err
}
if _, err := db.Exec(`INSERT INTO users(name) VALUES (?)`, "Ada"); err != nil {
    return err
}

// Version control is plain SQL on the same connection.
var commit string
if err := db.QueryRow(`SELECT dolt_commit('-A', '-m', ?)`, "add ada").Scan(&commit); err != nil {
    return err
}

rows, err := db.Query(`SELECT commit_hash, message FROM dolt_log`)

Every DoltLite feature — branches, merges, dolt_log/dolt_diff/dolt_branches, remotes — is reachable through SQL; there is no separate API. See the DoltLite documentation.

Concurrency

Safe to use from multiple goroutines through *sql.DB, including its connection pool.

Writers to one database still serialize, as in SQLite. A connection waits up to five seconds for a contended write before returning "database is locked"; change that per connection with PRAGMA busy_timeout = <ms>. Transactions begin as BEGIN IMMEDIATE, so contention surfaces at Begin where it can be waited on, rather than partway through a transaction where it cannot.

Why not embedded Dolt?

If you want versioned SQL in a new Go program, prefer github.com/dolthub/driver: it embeds Dolt itself in pure Go, needs no cgo, and gives you the full Dolt feature set with MySQL dialect.

Use this package when you specifically need DoltLite databases — a single-file chunk store that embedded Dolt cannot open — or SQLite dialect compatibility for an existing SQLite application, or a small C library rather than Dolt's dependency tree.

Platforms

Linux and macOS. Windows is not supported yet: the build links the platform's zlib, which the MSVC toolchain does not provide.

Source

The package source lives in dolthub/doltlite under packaging/go/; send issues and pull requests there.