cinchdb 0.1.14

A Git-like SQLite database management system with branching and multi-tenancy

CinchDB

Git-like SQLite database management with branching and multi-tenancy

NOTE: CinchDB is in early alpha. This is project to test out an idea. Do not use this in production.

CinchDB is for projects that need fast queries, isolated data per-tenant or even per-user, and a branchable database that makes it easy to merge changes between branches.

On a meta level: I made this because I wanted a database structure that I felt comfortable letting AI agents take full control over, safely, and I didn't want to run my own Postgres instance somewhere or pay for it on e.g. Neon - I don't need hyperscaling, I just need super fast queries.

Because it's so lightweight and its only dependencies are pydantic, requests, and Typer, it makes for a perfect local development database that can be controlled programmatically.

# Recommended: Install with uv (faster, better dependency resolution)
uv add cinchdb

# Or with pip
pip install cinchdb

# Initialize project
cinch init 

# Create and query tables
cinch table create users name:TEXT email:TEXT
cinch query "SELECT * FROM users"

# Git-like branching
cinch branch create feature
cinch branch switch feature
cinch table create products name:TEXT price:REAL
cinch branch merge-into-main feature

# Multi-tenant support
cinch tenant create customer_a
cinch query "SELECT * FROM users" --tenant customer_a

# Future: Remote connectivity planned for production deployment

# Autogenerate Python SDK from database
cinch codegen generate python cinchdb_models/

What is CinchDB?

CinchDB combines SQLite with Git-like workflows for database schema management:

• Branch schemas like code - create feature branches, make changes, merge back
• Multi-tenant isolation - shared schema, isolated data per tenant
• Automatic change tracking - all schema changes tracked and mergeable
• Safe structure changes - change merges happen atomically with zero rollback risk (seriously)
• Type-safe Python SDK - Python SDK with full type safety
• SDK generation from database schema - Generate a typesafe SDK from your database models for CRUD operations

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+:

pip install cinchdb

Quick Start

CLI Usage

# Initialize project
cinch init my_app
cd my_app

# Create schema on feature branch
cinch branch create user-system
cinch table create users username:TEXT email:TEXT
cinch view create active_users "SELECT * FROM users WHERE created_at > datetime('now', '-30 days')"

# Merge to main
cinch branch merge-into-main user-system

# Multi-tenant operations
cinch tenant create customer_a
cinch tenant create customer_b
cinch query "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users" --tenant customer_a

Python SDK

import cinchdb
from cinchdb.models import Column

# Local connection
db = cinchdb.connect("myapp")

# Create schema
db.create_table("posts", [
    Column(name="title", type="TEXT",nullable=False),
    Column(name="content", type="TEXT")
])

# Query data
results = db.query("SELECT * FROM posts WHERE title LIKE ?", ["%python%"])

# CRUD operations - single insert
post_id = db.insert("posts", {"title": "Hello World", "content": "First post"})

# Batch insert - multiple records at once
posts = db.insert("posts",
    {"title": "First", "content": "Content 1"},
    {"title": "Second", "content": "Content 2"},
    {"title": "Third", "content": "Content 3"}
)

# Or with a list using star expansion
post_list = [
    {"title": "Post A", "content": "Content A"},
    {"title": "Post B", "content": "Content B"}
]
results = db.insert("posts", *post_list)

db.update("posts", post_id, {"content": "Updated content"})

Architecture

• Python SDK: Core functionality for local development
• CLI: Full-featured command-line interface

Security & Encryption

Optional transparent encryption for tenant databases:

# Enable encryption
export CINCH_ENCRYPT_DATA=true
export CINCH_ENCRYPTION_KEY="$(python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe(32))')"

# Install encryption library
pip install pysqlcipher3

• Tenant databases: Encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305 (~2-5% overhead)
• Metadata: Unencrypted for operational simplicity
• Integration: Transparent - no code changes needed

Works without encryption libraries - gracefully falls back to standard SQLite.

Development

git clone https://github.com/russellromney/cinchdb.git
cd cinchdb
make install-all
make test

Future

Though probably not, perhaps I'll evolve it into something bigger and more full-featured, with things like

• data backups
• replication to S3
• audit access
• SaaS-like dynamics
• multi-project hosting
• auth proxying
• leader-follower abilities for edge deployment

License

Apache 2.0 - see LICENSE

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CinchDB - Database management as easy as version control