GitHub - alibaba/AliSQL: AliSQL is a MySQL branch originated from Alibaba Group. Fetch document from Release Notes at bottom. · GitHub

AliSQL

Alibaba's Enterprise MySQL Branch with DuckDB OLAP & Native Vector Search

Battle-tested in Alibaba's production environment, powering millions of databases

Features • Quick Start • Docs • Roadmap • Contributing

Why AliSQL?

AliSQL brings enterprise-grade capabilities to MySQL, combining the reliability of InnoDB OLTP with DuckDB's blazing-fast analytics and native vector search — all through familiar MySQL interfaces.

200x Faster Analytics

DuckDB columnar engine delivers 200x speedup on analytical queries compared to InnoDB |

Native Vector Search

Built-in HNSW algorithm supporting up to 16,383 dimensions for AI/ML workloads |

100% MySQL Compatible

Use your existing MySQL tools, drivers, and SQL — zero learning curve

Key Features

Feature | Description | Status

DuckDB Storage Engine | Columnar OLAP engine with automatic compression, perfect for analytics workloads | Available Vector Index (VIDX) | Native vector storage & ANN search with HNSW, supports COSINE & EUCLIDEAN distance | Available DDL Optimization | Instant DDL, parallel B+tree construction, non-blocking locks | Planned RTO Optimization | Accelerated crash recovery for faster instance startup | Planned Replication Boost | Binlog Parallel Flush, Binlog in Redo, large transaction optimization | Planned

Quick Start

Option 1: Build from Source

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL.git cd AliSQL

Build (release mode)

sh build.sh -t release -d ~/alisql

Install

make install

Option 2: Set Up a DuckDB Analytical Node

Step-by-step guide: How to set up a DuckDB node

Initialize & Start Server

Initialize data directory

~/alisql/bin/mysqld --initialize-insecure --datadir=~/alisql/data

Start the server

~/alisql/bin/mysqld --datadir=~/alisql/data

Usage Examples

DuckDB for Analytics

-- Create an analytical table with DuckDB engine CREATE TABLE sales_analytics ( sale_date DATE, product_id INT, revenue DECIMAL(10,2), quantity INT ) ENGINE=DuckDB;

-- Run complex analytics (200x faster than InnoDB!) SELECT DATE_FORMAT(sale_date, '%Y-%m') as month, SUM(revenue) as total_revenue, COUNT(*) as transactions FROM sales_analytics GROUP BY month ORDER BY total_revenue DESC;

Vector Search for AI Applications

-- Create a table with vector column CREATE TABLE embeddings ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, content TEXT, embedding VECTOR(768) -- 768-dimensional vectors ) ENGINE=InnoDB;

-- Create HNSW index for fast ANN search CREATE VECTOR INDEX idx_embedding ON embeddings(embedding);

-- Find similar items using cosine distance SELECT id, content, COSINE_DISTANCE(embedding, '[0.1, 0.2, ...]') as distance FROM embeddings ORDER BY distance LIMIT 10;

Build Options

Option | Description | Default

Prerequisites: CMake 3.x+, Python 3, GCC 7+ or Clang 5+

Roadmap

Q4 2025 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ [x] DuckDB Storage Engine [x] Vector Index (VIDX) [x] Open Source

2026 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ [ ] DDL Optimization [ ] RTO Optimization [ ] Replication Boost - Instant DDL - Fast Crash Recovery - Binlog Parallel Flush - Parallel B+tree - Minimize RTO - Binlog in Redo - Non-blocking Locks - Large TX Optimization

Documentation

Document | Description

DuckDB Integration Guide | Complete guide for DuckDB storage engine Vector Index Guide | Native vector storage and ANN search Release Notes | What's new in AliSQL 8.0.44 Setup DuckDB Node | Quick setup guide for analytics

External Resources:

Contributing

AliSQL became open source in December 2025 and is actively maintained by Alibaba Cloud Database Team.

We welcome contributions of all kinds!

Fork the repository
Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
Open a Pull Request

For bugs and feature requests, please use GitHub Issues.

Related Tools

RDSAI CLI — AI-Powered Database Assistant

RDSAI CLI is a next-generation, AI-powered CLI that transforms how you interact with AliSQL and MySQL databases. Describe your intent in natural language , and the AI agent handles the rest.

Install

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aliyun/rdsai-cli/main/install.sh | sh

Connect and ask in natural language

rdsai --host localhost -u root -p secret -D mydb mysql> analyze index usage on users table mysql> show me slow queries from the last hour mysql> why this query is slow: SELECT * FROM users WHERE name LIKE '%john%'

Key Features:

Natural language to SQL conversion (English/中文)
AI-powered query optimization and diagnostics
Execution plan analysis with Ctrl+E
Multi-model LLM support (Qwen, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, etc.)
Performance benchmarking with automated analysis

👉 Get Started with RDSAI CLI

Community & Support

GitHub Issues For bug reports & feature requests Open an Issue | Alibaba Cloud RDS Managed DuckDB analytical instances Learn More

License

AliSQL is licensed under GPL-2.0 , the same license as MySQL.

See the LICENSE file for details.

Star History

Made with care by Alibaba Cloud Database Team

GitHub • MySQL • DuckDB