// the find
alibaba/AliSQL
AliSQL is a MySQL branch originated from Alibaba Group. Fetch document from Release Notes at bottom.
AliSQL is Alibaba's MySQL 8.0.44 fork that embeds DuckDB as a pluggable storage engine and adds native HNSW vector search — both features accessible via standard MySQL SQL syntax. Open-sourced in December 2025, it targets teams running OLTP on MySQL who want analytics or AI workloads on the same database without adding a separate system. If you're already on MySQL and reaching for ClickHouse or pgvector, this is the direct competitor.
- DuckDB-as-a-storage-engine is the right architectural call: you get columnar execution inside MySQL without ETL pipelines or a separate process. CREATE TABLE ... ENGINE=DuckDB is all it takes to route a table to the columnar path.
- Vector index (VIDX) supports up to 16,383 dimensions with HNSW and exposes COSINE_DISTANCE/EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE as SQL functions — the same pattern pgvector uses, so the mental model is familiar and the SQL is portable.
- Based on MySQL 8.0.44 LTS, not some ancient 5.7 fork. Alibaba is likely to track upstream security patches since they run this in production at scale.
- Production provenance matters for a database fork. This has reportedly run millions of instances in Alibaba Cloud — that's a different confidence level than a research prototype.
- The '200x faster analytics' claim has no methodology attached. DuckDB will beat InnoDB on aggregation — that's expected — but the actual number depends entirely on query shape, selectivity, and whether data lives in DuckDB or InnoDB tables. Benchmark without workload description is noise.
- Just open-sourced in December 2025. No official binary packages, no Docker image in the repo, build-from-source only for a C++ MySQL fork. The build script works but standing up a test instance is a half-day job on a good day.
- DDL optimization, crash recovery (RTO), and replication improvements are all marked Planned for 2026 — which means the features that differentiate a MySQL fork for operational teams aren't there yet. You're adopting ahead of the feature set.
- Data synchronization between InnoDB and DuckDB tables is not explained anywhere in the README or linked docs. If you have a DuckDB analytical table, how do you keep it in sync with the InnoDB OLTP table? Manual INSERT? Triggers? This is the core operational question and it's completely unanswered.