Mycat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

9514 stars · 3805 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

MyCAT is an open-source database middleware written in Java that acts as a distributed MySQL cluster proxy, providing sharding, read/write splitting, and transparent scaling of backend databases. It presents itself to clients as a MySQL-compatible server, letting applications migrate from single-node databases to a distributed setup with minimal changes.

Use cases

• shard a large MySQL table across multiple database nodes
• set up read/write splitting for a MySQL cluster
• replace an expensive Oracle cluster with an open-source distributed database
• scale a single-node MySQL database horizontally without changing application code
• route SQL queries to the correct backend database shard
• migrate a stand-alone database to a cloud/distributed architecture

When to choose

• you need transparent MySQL sharding or read/write splitting behind a MySQL-protocol proxy
• you want to scale out an existing MySQL application with minimal code changes
• you need an open-source alternative to commercial database clusters

When to avoid

• you need a fully supported, actively developed solution - the 1.6 line has known bugs (batch inserts, multi-statement SQL) and development is largely volunteer maintenance
• you want a modern distributed SQL database rather than middleware in front of MySQL
• your workload relies on features MyCAT 1.6 does not support, such as multiple statements in one SQL

Facets

service · maturity maintenance

database middleware routing caching databases microservices big-data backend jvm self-hosted database-middleware mysql-proxy sharding read-write-splitting database-cluster linux docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="MyCATApache/Mycat-Server")