Dolt is Git for Data: a SQL database that you can fork, clone, branch, merge

You can also use Git for data!

It’s a bit slower, but smart use of partial/shallow clones can address performance degradation on large repositories over time. You just need to take care of the transformation between “physical” trees/blobs and “logical” objects in your dataset (which may not have 1:1 mapping, as having physical layer more granular reduces likelihood of merge conflicts).

I’m also following Pijul, which seems very promising in regards to versioning data—I believe they might introduce primitives allowing to operate on changes in actual data structures rather than between lines in files, like with Git.

Add to that sound theory of patches, and that’s a definite win over Git (or Doit for that matter, which seems to be same old Git but for SQL).

I find a balance between this using git on JSON files. And I build the JSON files into a database (1 file per record, 1 directory per table, subdirectories for indexes). The whole thing is pretty beautiful, and it's functioning well for a user-account, access management database I'm running in production. I like that I can go back and do:

`git diff -p` to see the users who have signed up recently, for example.

You can get the code, over at: https://github.com/i5ik/sirdb

The advantages of this approach are using existing unix tooling for text files, solid versioning, easy inspect-ability, and leveraging the filesystem B-Tree indexing as a fast index structure (rather than having to write my b-trees). Another advantage is hardware-linked scaling. For example, if I use regular hard disks, it's slower. But if I use SSDs it's faster. And i should also be possible to mount the DB as a RAM disk and make it super fast.

The disadvantages are that the database side still only supports a couple of operations (like exact, multikey searches, lookup by ID, and so on) rather than a rich query language. I'm OK with that for now, and I'm also thinking of using skiplists in future to get nice ordering property for the keys in an index so I can easily iterate and page over those.