https://github.com/cowsql/cowsql
Embeddable, replicated and fault tolerant SQL engine.
https://github.com/cowsql/cowsql
Last synced: 18 days ago
JSON representation
Embeddable, replicated and fault tolerant SQL engine.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/cowsql/cowsql
- Owner: cowsql
- License: other
- Created: 2023-08-08T11:51:27.000Z (over 2 years ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2025-11-25T09:40:40.000Z (4 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2026-02-04T10:58:55.506Z (about 1 month ago)
- Language: C
- Size: 2.69 MB
- Stars: 212
- Watchers: 3
- Forks: 16
- Open Issues: 4
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
- Authors: AUTHORS
Awesome Lists containing this project
- awesome-starred - cowsql/cowsql - Embeddable, replicated and fault tolerant SQL engine. (others)
- awesome-repositories - cowsql/cowsql - Embeddable, replicated and fault tolerant SQL engine. (C)
README
cowsql [](https://github.com/cowsql/cowsql/actions/workflows/build-and-test.yml) [](https://codecov.io/gh/cowsql/cowsql) [](https://cowsql.dev)
======
[English](./README.md)|[简体中文](./README_CH.md)
[cowsql](https://cowsql.dev) (/ˈkaʊ,siːkwəl/
[listen](http://ipa-reader.xyz/?text=%CB%88ka%CA%8A%2Csi%CB%90kw%C9%99l)) is a C
library that implements an embeddable and replicated SQL database engine with
high availability and automatic failover.
cowsql extends [SQLite](https://sqlite.org/) with a network protocol that can
connect together various instances of your application and have them act as a
highly-available cluster, with no dependency on external databases.
The name "cowsql" loosely refers to the ["pets
vs. cattle"](https://iamondemand.com/blog/devops-concepts-pets-vs-cattle/)
concept, since it's generaly fine to delete or rebuild a particular node of an
application that uses cowsql for data storage.
Fork of Canonical dqlite
------------------------
cowsql is a fork of Canonical's [dqlite](https://github.com/canonical/dqlite)
project, which was originally written by cowsql's author
[himself](https://github.com/canonical/dqlite/commits?author=freeekanayaka)
while working at Canonical.
Design highlights
----------------
* Asynchronous single-threaded implementation using [libuv](https://libuv.org/)
as event loop.
* Custom wire protocol optimized for SQLite primitives and data types.
* Data replication based on the [Raft](https://raft.github.io/) algorithm and its
efficient [C-raft](https://github.com/cowsql/raft) implementation.
License
-------
The cowsql library is released under a slightly modified version of LGPLv3, that
includes a copyright exception allowing users to statically link the library
code in their project and release the final work under their own terms. See the
full [license](./LICENSE) text.
Compatibility
-------------
cowsql runs on Linux and requires a kernel with support for [native async
I/O](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/io_setup.2.html) (not to be confused
with [POSIX AIO](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/aio.7.html)), which is
used by the libuv backend of C-raft.
Try it
-------
The simplest way to see cowsql in action is to use the demo program that comes
with the Go cowsql bindings. Please see the [relevant
documentation](https://github.com/cowsql/go-cowsql#demo) in that project.
Media
-----
There's no video about cowsql itself yet, but a talk about dqlite was given at
FOSDEM 2020, you can watch it
[here](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dqlite/).
[Here](https://gcore.com/blog/comparing-litestream-rqlite-dqlite/) is a blog post from 2022 comparing dqlite with rqlite and Litestream, other replication software for SQLite. It largly applies to cowsql too.
Wire protocol
-------------
If you wish to write a client, please refer to the [wire protocol](https://dqlite.io/docs/protocol)
documentation.
Install
-------
If you are on a Debian-based system, you can get the latest development release from
cowsql's [dev PPA](https://launchpad.net/~cowsql/+archive/ubuntu/master):
```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cowsql/main
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcowsql-dev
```
Build
-----
To build libcowsql from source you'll need:
* A reasonably recent version of [libuv](http://libuv.org/) (v1.8.0 or beyond).
* A reasonably recent version of sqlite3-dev
* A build of the [C-raft](https://github.com/cowsql/raft) Raft library.
Your distribution should already provide you with a pre-built libuv shared
library and libsqlite3-dev.
To build the raft library:
```
git clone https://github.com/cowsql/raft.git
cd raft
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
```
Once all the required libraries are installed, in order to build the cowsql
shared library itself, you can run:
```
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo make install
```