DoltLite is a fork of SQLite with Dolt-inspired storage and version control. It was initially birthed in a week of Gas Town multi-agent fury-osa. I didn’t stop there. I’ve been working on DoltLite pretty much constantly since. I’ve switched to a dueling-agents setup. Here’s my GitHub contribution graph over the past year. I think you can see when I started on DoltLite.
DoltLite just keeps getting better through an intelligence hill climb. Intelligence finds issues. Intelligence fixes issues. Intelligence writes tests. Intelligence finds issues… Most times, it is machine intelligence but there is a mix of human intelligence in there as well.
DoltLite recently crossed 1,000 Pull Requests (PRs) and now sits at 1,153 merged PRs. DoltLite was born on March 16, 2026, and the first 350 commits were done directly to master. But after that, we’ve averaged almost 12 PRs a day for its existence. These write-only code projects move fast!
With all those PRs, how good could DoltLite possibly be? It’s getting very good. DoltLite has a handful of users building something with it already, and reports are of the form “DoltLite is very stable”.
SQL Engine#
The SQL engine is the same as SQLite, and the test coverage is impeccable. There are 5.7M sqllogictests testing complex SQL queries. DoltLite passes them all. There are ~670,000 SQLite acceptance tests in the form of TCL scripts. DoltLite passes all of them except ~5,700, which use SQLite properties not ported to DoltLite. Most of these tests probe rowid but DoltLite requires primary keyed tables for version control. Any tests in the 5,700 that can be ported to DoltLite have been in a separate test file.
Performance#
DoltLite performance is good for file-backed databases, clocking in at about 5% faster than SQLite for reads and 40% slower on writes for file-backed databases using sysbench. The big performance tax hits if you commit every write. This costs about 4X SQLite. DoltLite is still blazingly fast compared to network-backed databases so we’re talking less than half a millisecond difference per write.
Version Control#
The DoltLite version control is covered by ~2,000 Dolt oracle tests. I’m less confident in this functionality despite the test suite. So if you’re going to find a bug or missing feature, it’s going to be in DoltLite version control. That said, I can turn features around pretty quickly as seen with this dolt_workspace feature request a couple weekends ago.
Try It!#
Anyway, this is my way of saying, just because the DoltLite train is moving fast doesn’t mean you can’t hop on. If you want a local-first Dolt, DoltLite is the tool for you. DoltLite curious? Come by our Discord and stop by the #doltlite🪶 channel.