alibaba/otter

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

8126 stars · 2459 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

Otter is Alibaba's distributed database synchronization system that parses database incremental logs (via Canal) to replicate data near-real-time between MySQL/Oracle instances across local or remote datacenters. It uses a manager/node architecture with Zookeeper-based coordination and was built for bidirectional (dual-A) replication between geographically separated datacenters.

Use cases

• sync mysql data between datacenters
• replicate database changes in near real-time
• set up bidirectional replication between two active datacenters
• sync data between china and us datacenters
• stream database binlog changes to another database
• replicate mysql to oracle
• build a distributed database sync pipeline

When to choose

• you need near-real-time incremental sync between MySQL or Oracle databases
• you need bidirectional (dual-write) replication across geographically distant datacenters
• you want a web-managed, Zookeeper-coordinated sync cluster at large scale

When to avoid

• you only need simple one-off database migration or backup
• your databases are not MySQL or Oracle
• you want a lightweight single-node CDC tool without a manager/node cluster
• you need sync for non-relational stores like Kafka or search indexes as first-class targets

Facets

application · maturity maintenance

database etl streaming message-queue web-framework databases microservices self-hosted jvm self-hosted database-replication cdc mysql oracle canal zookeeper cross-datacenter-sync dual-write data-engineering linux docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="alibaba/otter")