The database for our time
To simplify development, reporting and compliance for immutable systems.
SQL that remembers everything,
with corrections and flexible schema,
for fine-grained reporting and time travel:
Installation
Run XTDB using Docker and connect via a PostgreSQL wire-compatible connection.
# latest release, 100% open source (MPL-2.0 license)
docker run -p 5432:5432 ghcr.io/xtdb/xtdb# connect via Postgres tooling and drivers, e.g.
psql -h localhost xtdb -c "SELECT 42"
“Why did we make that decision?”
Effective auditability drives trust and learning, supported by:
- Immutable records and observations
- Handling of errors and delays
- Decisions aligned with full context
- Easy reflection on past states
Immutability is not enough.
You need time travel.
The status quo
Most systems model the world as it currently is. The history of changes is hard to access and meaningfully query — even basic analysis becomes unreliable when everything is shifting.
Immutability helps, but...
Data lakes and table formats give you immutability, which helps. But snapshots are coarse and few systems attempt to solve the harder aspects of time travel.
The hard truth
If you can't query the past, you will struggle to meet the requirements of the future.
"What was the state of the business as-of 5pm on Friday given the backdated additions and corrections as-of 9am this morning?"
XTDB's bitemporal design provides a robust foundation for auditable reporting, and therefore auditable decision making. This is valued across every level of an organization:
When XTDB Helps
Auditable reporting for Change Data Integration
Augment existing applications
Symptoms
- ✗ Ad hoc reconciliation processes that lack central transparency
- ✗ Historical records accepted as "at best an approximation"
- ✗ Bespoke time-travel logic: soft deletes, timestamp columns, snapshot tables, custom schema versioning
Solution
- › Universal history tracking with a complete audit trail — reduces requirements burden on individual applications
- › Native Debezium ingestion for Change Data Integration — as-of queries across many CDC sources
- › Decision auditability layer for durable orchestration workflows and agentic workflows
New Development
Build new applications
Pains
- ✗ Complexity and fragility of ad hoc temporal columns
- ✗ Cost of building, testing, and maintaining custom history logic
- ✗ Bitemporal semantics not enforced universally — analytics requires deep schema knowledge
- ✗ Audit and corrections hard to budget for up front, but requirements loom large
Solution
- › Transactional database with automatic bitemporal versioning on every write
- › Postgres-compatible APIs — works with existing clients and tools
- › Open source and open standards: SQL:2011, Apache Arrow, ADBC
Who XTDB Helps
How XTDB solves
Decision Auditability
XTDB delivers time-travel SQL over immutable object storage.
Business data as evolving time series.
XTDB records a full 'bitemporal' history of data, observable across time:
- Some data is always 'on time'
- Other data often arrives late
- Mistakes must be corrected
- Data evolves and 'versions' are retained
Grounded in DBMS History & Semantics
CMU talk hosted by Prof. Andy Pavlo
Watch the full lecture Future Data Systems Seminar Series — Fall 2025, featuring MotherDuck, Snowflake, Databricks etc.
An architecture for decision intelligence.
Transactional data with perfect memory:
- History without headaches - avoid custom versioning, 'soft deletes', and brittle data pipelines
- Object store LSM-Tree design with bitemporal historical partitioning for durability, scalability, and cost-effective retention
- Postgres-compatible SERIALIZABLE SQL transactions with optimistic concurrency
- Fine-grained interval versioning with Apache Arrow for temporal analytics and scale-out compute
XTDB Conversations
Available now through cloud marketplaces.
Deploy XTDB directly from your cloud provider — and also on-prem.
Request a demo
Schedule a free demo with our solution engineers to learn how XTDB can help address your complex domain and architecture requirements.
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