bintrail

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<img src="docs/img/dbtrail _ header.png" alt="dbtrail — the open-source time-travel flashback for MySQL. Every change leaves a trail: follow it back." width="100%">

Point-in-time recovery for MySQL and PostgreSQL --- no locks, no schema changes, no waiting for a restore.

  

SELECT * FROM orders WHERE id = 123 AS OF '2026-05-20 14:00:00'

— against production MySQL/Postgres. That's the experience dbtrail makes possible.

<img src="docs/img/console-overview.png" alt="dbtrail console: what changed recently and where — every row change indexed, deletes surfaced first" width="850">

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What you get

dbtrail tails the MySQL binary log or the Postgres WAL and keeps every row change with full before/after images in a searchable index:

• See every change — what changed and when, for every row, with before → after diffs
• Undo precisely — generate exact reversal SQL for just the damaged rows
• Undo foreign-key cascades — reconstruct child rows an ON DELETE CASCADE wiped out, and restore the foreign keys an ON DELETE SET NULL cleared or an ON UPDATE CASCADE/SET NULL re-pointed when a parent's key changed — all of which InnoDB applies below the binlog, where most tools can't see them — see Query & Recovery
• Time-travel — query any row (or table) as it was at any moment, from the web console or the reconstruct CLI; the live SQL AS OF interface additionally needs ProxySQL — see Time-Travel SQL
• Who changed this? — session attribution (database user, host, and client program behind a change) is available in the commercial distribution (dbtrail EE)
• Prove the safety net holds — bintrail verify checks (off-line, drift-free) that a recovery would actually reproduce the source, and bintrail status flags any gap in the captured stream — so you find out before you need it — see Verify
• Web console — browse, recover, and add servers to monitor, all in the UI
• Ask it in plain English — connect Claude Desktop to your console in one click (an .mcpb bundle and a copy-paste URL: 5-minute guide); any MCP client works — see the MCP server reference

Works with MySQL, Percona Server for MySQL, Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Amazon Aurora MySQL (verified); Google Cloud SQL for MySQL is expected to work — please report issues. dbtrail connects over the replication protocol, so it never needs the binlog files on disk (that's what makes managed cloud databases work). Requires MySQL 8.0+ with binlog_format=ROW and binlog_row_image=FULL; bintrail doctor checks both and prints the exact fix.

Install

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

This downloads the Compose stack, brings it up, waits for the console, and prints what to do next. Then:

1. Open http://127.0.0.1:8090 — on first run, create a username and password (that's your login from now on).
2. Click + Add server, pick the source type (MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL), and paste the database you want to watch — host, user, password. dbtrail runs preflight checks, provisions an index, and starts streaming within the minute.

PostgreSQL & MariaDB (alpha) sources

The same one-line install — the console captures PostgreSQL and MariaDB sources too, not just MySQL. In + Add server, choose the source type; PostgreSQL reveals fields for the database, replication slot, and publication. PostgreSQL needs a one-time source-side setup first (wal_level = logical, REPLICA IDENTITY FULL, and a publication — dbtrail validates these and never runs DDL on your source). Full walkthrough, incl. managed RDS/Aurora/Cloud SQL: PostgreSQL source · MariaDB source (alpha).

Just curious? One container, zero setup, time-travel SQL in 30 seconds:

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

See the demo image.

Documentation

| Start here | Reference | Operations | |---|---|---| | Install | Query & Recovery | Deployment · Capacity | | Quickstart | Web console | Rotation & Status | | DBA guide | Time-Travel SQL · Verify recoveries | Docker | | 30-second demo | Streaming · Indexing | Upload to S3 · S3 IAM policy · Upgrading | | | MariaDB source (alpha) · PostgreSQL source | Server identity | | | Connect an AI assistant · MCP server | Parquet debugging | | | Dump & Baseline · DDL tracking | |

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 off in one line:

bintrail telemetry off      # or: DO_NOT_TRACK=1, BINTRAIL_TELEMETRY=off
bintrail telemetry show     # see exactly what would be sent — sends nothing

No identifier of any kind is stored or transmitted, so there is nothing tying those statistics to you or your machine. A binary you build yourself has no reporting address compiled in and is incapable of sending 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 welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md (CLA 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. See SUPPORT.md for the ship-vs-operate boundary.