What Makes Dolt Easy?

We think one of the big advantages of Dolt is that it can be downloaded and running on your machine in under a minute. Maybe a little bit longer when you set up your DoltHub login so you can push or pull from DoltHub. This means any developer can have Dolt and a copy of a production database locally to test their changes to the database, application, etc. without worrying they are taking making a change to the actual production database.

Dolt also marries two familiar concepts, Git and MySQL. If you know Git and MySQL, you already know how to use Dolt.

Where Should I Start?

One of the best use cases to get started using Dolt is to version control your existing database in Dolt. This is additive to your existing environment and won't require changes to your existing infrastructure. Once you have stored 2 or more versions of your database in Dolt, you will be able to produce cell-wise diff queries.

To get started, download Dolt, create a dump file of your existing database, and load it into Dolt.

Now What?

Once you have your database in Dolt, what's the benefit? Diffs! DoltHub will automatically tell you the diff's between commits in your database. This can be very useful when ingesting data from multiple sources on a regular basis. In this video, we walk through how diffs helped us realize we had an error in our process when grabbing data from the NBA's api for our S.H.A.Q. bounty. Here's the database referenced in the video.

Let us know your Dolt use cases and other videos you would find helpful on Discord.