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What is DoubleDino?

DoubleDino is a lightweight binary that lets engineering teams safely access production data without exposing sensitive information.

It runs entirely inside your infrastructure and connects directly to an existing data source. Every value that may contain sensitive information is deterministically transformed before leaving the process, allowing developers to work with realistic production data while protecting customer privacy.

DoubleDino never requires agents, SDKs, browser plugins or application changes.

Two operating modes​

DoubleDino supports two independent workflows.

Clone​

Creates a fully transformed copy of an existing data source.

The source is read, sensitive values are deterministically redacted, relationships are preserved, and the final result is written into a destination database of the same type. Once complete, DoubleDino exits.

Typical use cases include:

  • Development environments
  • QA and testing
  • Analytics
  • Training datasets

Proxy​

Starts a lightweight HTTP server that exposes read-only access to an existing production data source.

Developers submit queries using the native query language of the underlying database and receive JSON responses with sensitive information already transformed.

Typical use cases include:

  • Debugging production issues
  • Customer support investigations
  • Engineering tools
  • Internal dashboards

How it works​

Every DoubleDino instance connects to exactly one source.

Depending on the selected mode it either:

  • Creates a transformed destination database (Clone)
  • Serves transformed query results over HTTP (Proxy)

Each instance is independent and starts in seconds, making it easy to run multiple instances for different databases or environments.

Supported data sources​

DoubleDino currently supports:

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MariaDB
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Log files

Support varies slightly depending on the data source. See Supported Data Sources for details.

Security first​

DoubleDino is designed around a simple principle:

Sensitive information should never leave your infrastructure unprotected.

Transformation happens before data is returned to a client or written into a cloned database. Identical input always produces identical output when using the same secret key, preserving relationships and allowing applications to behave normally while preventing exposure of the original values.

Next steps​

If you are responsible for deploying DoubleDino, continue with the Administrator Guide.

If you only need to query an existing DoubleDino instance, continue with the Developer Guide.