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Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale

87 points| mschoening | 4 years ago |planetscale.com

22 comments

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chris_st|4 years ago

I've been building a small personal app with PlanetScale and I like it a lot. Their way of doing schema branching works well, and is easy to use (though slightly tedious), and makes a lot of sense. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a pleased customer.

sorenbs|4 years ago

PlanetScale is the serverless relational database we have been waiting for all this time. It's truly excellent, and being based on the same tech that runs youtube, we know it will scale well.

js4ever|4 years ago

I noticed they just launched in aws eu-west-1 (Dublin, Ireland). There is now a new option to select the location when you create a new db. Yay it's now usable in Europe!

dyeje|4 years ago

Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.

k__|4 years ago

I had the impression they PS was interesting because they offer serverless SQL.

joshmarlow|4 years ago

The database branching idea seems to be popping up more and more. IIRC, TermniusDB supports it too - https://terminusdb.com/

I've not played with PlanetScale yet, but I am planning on playing with TerminusDB in the near future.

tenaciousDaniel|4 years ago

Interesting, I'd be fascinated to hear what tech you use, because I've always had a really hard time with migrations.

LukeEF|4 years ago

In the case of TerminusDB - which was mentioned in another comment - a branch is just a pointer, so isn't expensive. You basically get free clones, but don't have the risk of lots of messy copies of data everywhere

MapleWalnut|4 years ago

From what I understand, they only branch the schema. They don't copy the data.

rmah|4 years ago

This looks quite compelling, but what about use cases where "serverless" is simply not viable. In some industries, you must control access to the server in order to stay compliant with regulations. At least for some of the data. Is there a plan to have a software-only release? Or did I just miss it.

samlambert|4 years ago

We won't be doing software only releases or on prem software for PlanetScale. We do have an option to provision into your own cloud account so that the data lives inside your environment and you get all the PlanetScale magic.

TeeWEE|4 years ago

At Tiqets we have a different repo with SQL migrations using Flyway... ITs as simply as branching that repo, creating your migration. Getting the pipeline green and merging it back.

All migrations are automatically executed on production, pre-tested. Reviewed. No DB Administrator, No deployment together with the app.

It works quite well..

However, personally I really like not having to deal with schema changes. For example Firebase or Cloud DataStore is really nice... Its the best for developers, but not for data integrity.

nijave|4 years ago

This works fine for a lot of cases, but you can run into issues on larger databases. Things like default or calculated columns and indexes can seem like innocuous SQL but end up being incredibly expensive and even acquire locks that block other transactions on bigger databases.

We have some "medium sized" Postgres databases around 1-10TB and something like adding an index to a big table (100s millions of rows) can be quite expensive resource wise

(I'd say "big" is something like 20-50TB+ and small <1TB)

wizwit999|4 years ago

So is this product about the actual DB or the devex/ interface. Seems the real insight is in the latter. But the implementation is likely tied to MySQL. Would be cool to use with database of your choice, including existing managed dbs.

zinclozenge|4 years ago

So you create a TCP connection to your database over the public internet? Does it have an http api like aurora serverless/fauna/datastax astra?