Andy Pavlo is one of the leading minds in databases. He is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Andy writes a yearly database retrospective in his blog. His 2025 article came out last week and generated some buzz online and here at DoltHub HQ.
Andy mentions agents need database branches but does not mention Dolt. This made us sad. We’ve talked about Dolt in 2020 for Andy’s Quarantine Tech Talks series. That was a long time ago. Did he forget about us? This article outlines what Andy said, what we would add, and why Andy should reassess Dolt as a viable database.
Agents Need Branches#
Andy joins a long list of notable luminaries who have noticed agents need branches.
Here are Andy’s thoughts:
An interesting feature that has proven helpful for agents is database branching. Although not specific to MCP servers, branching allows agents to test database changes quickly without affecting production applications. Neon reported in July 2025 that agents create 80% of their databases. Neon was designed from the beginning to support branching (Nikita showed me an early demo when the system was still called “Zenith”), whereas other systems have added branching support later. See Xata’s recent comparison article on database branching.
And his commentary relating to MCP as a new database access layer:
On one hand, I’m happy that there is now a standard for exposing databases to more applications. But nobody should trust an application with unfettered database access, whether it is via MCP or the system’s regular API. And it remains good practice only to grant minimal privileges to accounts. Restricting accounts is especially important with unmonitored agents that may start going wild all up in your database. This means that lazy practices like giving admin privileges to every account or using the same account for every service are going to get wrecked when the LLM starts popping off.
We Agree!#
We obviously agree that database branches are helpful for AI use cases. However, we think Dolt is the only database with true branching. Branches without merges or diffs are called forks in version control parlance. We just wrote a technical article about how our branching approach works in comparison to Neon. We firmly believe Prolly Trees in a Git-style commit graph are the only way to build a version-controlled database. However, this approach required building a brand new database. Neon and others could leverage an existing database like Postgres but sacrifice merge and diff capabilities.
Dolt also added a built-in MCP server in 2025 joining “the year that every DBMS added support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)”. You caught us Andy.
Like Andy, we also think branches and a rich permissions model are required to protect your databases from getting “wrecked when the LLM starts popping off” using an MCP or any other interface. You may not even want to allow the database anywhere near your production database, preferring agents to work on a clone. Without a clone, you may want to add branch permissions to the standard SQL users and grants model. Dolt provides many layers of protection from LLMs and their pesky human ancestors.
Is Dolt Forgettable?#
How could Andy write about database branching and not mention Dolt? Usually, we just write these omissions off as “Dolt is new. He must not know about us.”
But in 2020, we spoke at one of Andy’s database tech talks.
We’re also an entry in the Database of databases which Andy maintains.
Is it possible Andy just forgot about us? Maybe. Even if he didn’t, we have an explanation.
When we presented in 2020, Dolt was just getting started. We were barely a functioning database. We were very focused on the data sharing use case. Dolt was 10-12X slower than MySQL. We barely has a functioning SQL analyzer so correctness of complex queries was suspect. This may be the database Andy has in his mind if he thinks of Dolt.
It’s time for Andy to update his priors. Dolt in 2025 is a fully-functioning, production-ready OLTP database.
- Dolt is 1.0, soon to be 2.0.
- Dolt is now faster than MySQL on
sysbench - A Dolt engineer will fix your correctness bugs in 24 hours or less if you find one.
- Dolt’s version control functionality is proven robust at scale.
If you know Andy, send him this article. Dolt is a real version-controlled database now. It’s safe to mention Dolt in database circles without fear of ridicule.
Conclusion#
Andy Pavlo thinks databases need branches. Dolt is the only database with real Git-style branches of data and schema. If you know Andy, remind him Dolt exists and let him know it’s a much better database than he recalls. If you do, make sure to also tell us you did on our Discord.