Dbtrail

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.

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 cascade deletes — reconstruct child rows an ON DELETE CASCADE wiped out (and restore FKs an ON DELETE SET NULL cleared) that InnoDB removes below the binlog and most tools can't see — 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
• MCP server — Claude or any MCP client can search history and draft recoveries

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 (beta) & 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 (beta) · 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

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.