bintrail

$ duckdb -init views.sql
D SELECT status, count(*) FROM state_shop_orders GROUP BY 1;

That query reads Parquet in your bucket. The MySQL primary never saw it.

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What you get

Reports, dashboards and ad-hoc analysis compete with your application when they run on the primary: full scans push the working set out of the buffer pool, and a long read holds back purge. A reporting replica is one more MySQL to pay for and patch, answering at MySQL speed. DBTrail gives those queries a copy of their own, one that also remembers the past.

An analytical copy

• Zero ETL. One full copy of each table, then only the binary log. DBTrail folds the changes into a new Parquet snapshot on your schedule, from every 5 minutes to once a day, without reading the source again. No pipeline, no warehouse, no Kafka. See Analytics with DuckDB.
• DuckDB, ready to open. One views.sql gives you one view per table, state_<schema>_<table>, that follows the newest snapshot on its own. Your DuckDB runs it, on your machine: a laptop, a notebook, a BI box.
• Open files, your bucket. Plain Parquet on disk or in S3, Hive-partitioned change history, nothing proprietary. Hand a table to Spark, Trino or Athena with bintrail export iceberg. See Iceberg export.
• Nothing inside the server. No plugin, no fork, no agent on the database host. DBTrail connects the way a replica does, so it works where you cannot load an engine: Amazon RDS and Aurora.

Time travel and recovery, from the same stream

DBTrail keeps every change on your MySQL server, before and after, and writes the SQL that undoes the ones you didn't want.

• Every version of every row. Query any row or table as it was at a past moment, from the web interface or the reconstruct CLI; the live SQL AS OF interface also needs ProxySQL. See Time-Travel SQL.
• Undo precisely. Generate the SQL that reverses just the damaged rows, including the child rows an ON DELETE CASCADE removed below the binary log. See Query & Recovery.
• Prove it holds. bintrail verify checks offline, without touching the source, that a recovery would reproduce it. bintrail status flags any gap in the captured stream. See Verify.
• Web interface and MCP. Add servers, schedule snapshots and browse changes in the browser. Connect Claude Desktop or any MCP client to ask in plain English (5-minute guide).

Works with MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon Aurora MySQL (verified). Google Cloud SQL for MySQL should work too; please report issues. MariaDB 10.11+ is supported as a source (MariaDB source). DBTrail connects over the replication protocol and never needs the binlog files on disk, which is why managed cloud databases work. It requires MySQL 8.0+ with binlog_format=ROW and binlog_row_image=FULL; bintrail doctor checks both and prints the exact fix.

What it is not. Not high availability: your application never points at the copy. Not a replacement for your physical backups: history starts the day you install it. Minutes behind the source, not seconds: the snapshot interval is your setting. See Analytics with DuckDB.

Try it in 30 seconds

One container, zero setup, time-travel SQL:

docker run --rm -p 6033:6033 ghcr.io/dbtrail/bintrail-demo

See the demo image.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbtrail/dbtrail/main/install.sh | sh

This downloads the Docker Compose stack, starts it, waits until DBTrail answers, and prints the next steps. The first four are the same as the start page:

1. Sign in. Open http://127.0.0.1:8090 and create a username and password.
2. Connect. Click + Add server, give the server a name, and fill in the host and port of your MySQL server. The form suggests a user and password for DBTrail and shows the SQL that creates that user; run it on your MySQL with a login that can create users and grant them privileges, then press Save.
3. First change. Change a row on your MySQL. It shows on the Overview within a minute, with an Undo that writes the SQL to reverse it.
4. First copy. The first snapshot is the analytical copy. Today it takes a folder created first, then on the Snapshots page: type it in Backup dir, Save, and press Create backup. The start page has the command that creates the folder. Set a schedule on the same page (every 5 minutes, for example) and each run after the first updates the copy from the recorded changes instead of reading the source.
5. Query it. On the MCP Server page, Download a DuckDB schema, then open it with duckdb -init views.sql. See Analytics with DuckDB.

Prefer the command line? See the command-line quickstart.

Documentation

Start here	Reference	Operations
Install	Analytics with DuckDB	Deployment · Capacity
Start page · Command-line quickstart	Dump & Baseline · Iceberg export	Rotation & Status
DBA guide	Query & Recovery · Time-Travel SQL	Docker
30-second demo	Verify recoveries · Web interface	Upload to S3 · S3 IAM policy · Upgrading
	Streaming · Indexing · DDL tracking	Server identity
	Connect an AI assistant · MCP server	Parquet debugging
	MariaDB source

Privacy

bintrail runs entirely in your infrastructure. Your database data never leaves it: not your rows, schemas, table names, queries, hostnames, DSNs, or file paths.

Official release builds do report metadata-only usage statistics: which command ran, whether it succeeded, a coarse error class, and your version and platform. It is on by default and turns off in one line:

bintrail telemetry off      # or: DO_NOT_TRACK=1, BINTRAIL_TELEMETRY=off
bintrail telemetry show     # prints what would be sent; sends nothing

No identifier of any kind is stored or transmitted, so nothing ties those statistics to you or your machine. A binary you build yourself has no reporting address compiled in and cannot send anything. TELEMETRY.md documents every field, every control, and the CI tests that enforce both.

The privacy policy covers the Claude Desktop extension (.mcpb), which reports nothing at all, and how data moves when an AI client queries your deployment.

License

Apache-2.0: free for any use, including commercial and production. Contributions are welcome; see CONTRIBUTING.md (a CLA is required, prompted automatically on your first PR).

Want the index server operated for you (sized, backed up, upgraded, kept alive on-call) instead of running it yourself? That is the managed service at dbtrail.com. SUPPORT.md draws the ship-vs-operate line.