We just migrated to PlanetScale Postgres Metal over the weekend. We are already seeing major query improvements. The migration was pretty smooth. Post-migration we hit a few issues (turned out it wasn't an issue with PlanetScale), and the PlanetScale team jumped in immediately to help us out, even on a Saturday morning so support's been amazing.
The Insights tab also surfaced missing indexes we added, which sped things up further. Early days, but so far so good.
Out of curiosity: how do you connect your databases to external services that are consuming these data? In places I do similar work, databases are usually in the same private network as the instances which are reading and writing data to them. If you put them somewhere on the internet, apart from security, doesn't it affect latency?
Not a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc
Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!
It's not a landing page, it's a blog, and if you read the first few sentences of the post it becomes immediately clear what service PlanetScale provides.
I mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar;
What is PlanetScale for Postgres?
Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.
This seems to be mainly aimed at existing PlanetScale customers.
> To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in to your PlanetScale account, create a new database, and select Postgres.
It does mention the sign up option but doesn't really give me much context about pricing or what it is. I know a bit, but I get confused by different database offerings, so it seems like a missed opportunity to give me two more sentences of context and some basic pricing - what's the easiest way for me to try this if I'm curious?
On the pricing page I can start selecting regions and moving slides to create a plan from $39/month and up, but I couldn't easily find an answer to if there's a free trial or cheaper way to 'give it a spin' without committing.
* Do you support something like Aurora Fast Cloning (whether a true CoW fast clone or detaching a replica _without_ promoting it into its own cluster / branch with its own replicas, incurring cost)?
* Can PlanetScale Postgres set `max_standby_streaming_delay` to an indefinite amount?
* The equivalent of Aurora blue/green would be to make a branch and then switch branches, right?
Any recommendations on how to best test our current workload of reads and writes? Also, if we are pretty certain we will need horizontal partitioning / sharding, would it be better to wait for Neki before considering a move?
For context we are on Aurora Postgres right now, with several read replicas.
Postgres (esoterically?) has some issues with index bloat on high-insert workloads, does PlanetScale do anything special to tune for this by default, since it caters to higher-perf workloads (over something like supabase)?
We’ve had early access to it for a while now, we’re already running a lot of performance critical workloads on it and it’s been working wonderfully. Congrats sam and the team on setting a new standard for what highly performant managed Postgres should look like :)
I don't know why but I can almost never understand American commercial software websites. "what is PlanetScale".....blah, blah blah....WHOOOOSH! No more enlightened than before. Even for products I've worked on - I read the page and can't recognise the thing I'm working on from the description.....
i'll take the opposite side. i was very impressed with their website.
the very first line:
> The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases
the second line:
> PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding.
i know exactly what they do. zero fluff. and, i'm now interested.
How does planetscale for postgres scale? I understand that it's multi node postgres with automatic failover but I think it only really scales for reads and not writes? So is the only way to scale writes horizontally to shard?
Kind of. For horizontally scaling writes we are building the Vitess for Postgres which we are calling Neki https://www.neki.dev/
The product we are GA'ing today has the option of PlanetScale Metal which is extremely fast and scales write QPS further than any of the other single-primary Postgres hosts.
Fair to say 500GB is small, especially compared to some of the folks who've already migrated, but do note that it's 15x RAM on the benchmark machines, so we really were testing the whole database and not just the memory bandwidth of the CPUs.
We were in the beta for this and they've been great.
We're presently in a migration for our larger instances on Heroku, but were able to test on a new product (fairly high writes/IOPs) and it's been nice to have more control vs. Heroku (specifically, ability to just buy more IOPs or storage).
Had one incident during the beta which we believed we caused on our own but within 5 minutes of pinging them they had thrown multiple engineers on it to debug and resolve quickly. For me, that's the main thing I care about with managed DB services as most tech is commoditization at this point.
Just wish the migration path from Heroku was a tad easier (Heroku blocks logical replication on all instances) but pushing through anyway because I want to use the metal offering.
The way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?
You don't (typically) lose the data on the ephemeral drive across a reboot but you definitely can (and do!) when there are more permanent hardware failures. (They really happen!) That's why PlanetScale always maintains at least three copies of the data. We guarantee durability via replication, not by trusting the (slow, network-attached) block device.
can't speak to GCP specifically but usually the issue is they are host-attached and can't be migrated, so need to be wiped on VM termination or migration -- that's when you lose data.
Reboots typically don't otherwise do anything special unless they also trigger a host migration. GCP live migration has some mention of support though
note that stop/terminate via cloud APIs usually releases host capacity for other customers and would trigger data wipe, a guest initiated reboot typically will not.
I use Aurora Postgres at work, where we pay approximately 9x more for equivalent resources to PlanetScale (according to their pricing page [1]). This is not an endorsement of PlanetScale as I've never used it, just pointing out that the premium for using Aurora Postgres is many multiples higher than virtually every other Postgres provider.
I haven't used PlanetScale before, but AWS Aurora limits IOPS and network performance based on your instance size, so you end up in scenarios where you really wish you had more throughput, but sizing up your instance would be a very, very expensive solution
I really wish that the hobby tier hadn't gone but I also understand that planetscale is a b2b which imo I can respect yet still wish if I can try things in a hobby tier...
I read the comments and it seems that in one of them they mention between supabase vs planetscale postgres that maybe they can use a project like supabase and then come to planetscale when their project grows enough to support that decision.
How would a migration from supabase to planetscale even go and at what scale would something like that be remotely better i suppose.
Great project tho and I hope that planetscale's team doesn't get bored listening to all requests asking for a free tier like me, maybe I am addicted on those sweet freebies!
we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload.
Can you control where your application runs so that you don't have a ton of latency between this thing and the app? Seems to me like that could destroy a lot of the supposed gains...
Planetscale's Neki, Postgres 18, OrioleDB. Give it ~3 more years may be we can finally leave MySQL behind unless Oracle decide to do a 180 degree U turn.
PlanetScale created a business and profited off of an open source product called vitess from Google which is why they originally only supported mysql. Would love for them to open source their solution for postgres.
this is still using the OLTP engine though right? Can you use planetscale Postgres with any of the OLAP backends? Can I install the duckdb extension and get OLAP for free plus all the planetscale goodness?
theanirudh|5 months ago
The Insights tab also surfaced missing indexes we added, which sped things up further. Early days, but so far so good.
benterix|5 months ago
oefrha|5 months ago
ProofHouse|5 months ago
endorphine|5 months ago
ProofHouse|5 months ago
Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!
richieartoul|5 months ago
pier25|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
ProofHouse|5 months ago
What is PlanetScale for Postgres?
Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.
ritzaco|5 months ago
> To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in to your PlanetScale account, create a new database, and select Postgres.
It does mention the sign up option but doesn't really give me much context about pricing or what it is. I know a bit, but I get confused by different database offerings, so it seems like a missed opportunity to give me two more sentences of context and some basic pricing - what's the easiest way for me to try this if I'm curious?
On the pricing page I can start selecting regions and moving slides to create a plan from $39/month and up, but I couldn't easily find an answer to if there's a free trial or cheaper way to 'give it a spin' without committing.
intelekshual|5 months ago
https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever
dangoodmanUT|5 months ago
It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass
samlambert|5 months ago
bri3d|5 months ago
* Do you support something like Aurora Fast Cloning (whether a true CoW fast clone or detaching a replica _without_ promoting it into its own cluster / branch with its own replicas, incurring cost)?
* Can PlanetScale Postgres set `max_standby_streaming_delay` to an indefinite amount?
* The equivalent of Aurora blue/green would be to make a branch and then switch branches, right?
Ozzie_osman|5 months ago
For context we are on Aurora Postgres right now, with several read replicas.
endorphine|5 months ago
the_mitsuhiko|5 months ago
attentionstinks|5 months ago
sethreno|5 months ago
robraven|5 months ago
cocoflunchy|5 months ago
tacone|5 months ago
dangoodmanUT|5 months ago
bekacru|5 months ago
t43562|5 months ago
Postgres is involved somehow. I get that.
dfee|5 months ago
the very first line:
> The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases
the second line:
> PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding.
i know exactly what they do. zero fluff. and, i'm now interested.
https://planetscale.com/
M4v3R|5 months ago
> Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience.
fastball|5 months ago
gpi|5 months ago
vmg12|5 months ago
samlambert|5 months ago
The product we are GA'ing today has the option of PlanetScale Metal which is extremely fast and scales write QPS further than any of the other single-primary Postgres hosts.
qaq|5 months ago
ohxh|5 months ago
https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora
Seems a bit better, but they benchmarked on a kind of small db (500gb db / db.r8g.xlarge)
rcrowley|5 months ago
bentohn|5 months ago
We're presently in a migration for our larger instances on Heroku, but were able to test on a new product (fairly high writes/IOPs) and it's been nice to have more control vs. Heroku (specifically, ability to just buy more IOPs or storage).
Had one incident during the beta which we believed we caused on our own but within 5 minutes of pinging them they had thrown multiple engineers on it to debug and resolve quickly. For me, that's the main thing I care about with managed DB services as most tech is commoditization at this point.
Just wish the migration path from Heroku was a tad easier (Heroku blocks logical replication on all instances) but pushing through anyway because I want to use the metal offering.
anthonyronning|5 months ago
fourseventy|5 months ago
mattrobenolt|5 months ago
So yes, the data per-node is ephemeral, but it is redundant and durable for the whole cluster.
rcrowley|5 months ago
I did an interview all about PlanetScale Metal a couple of months ago: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r9PsVwGkg4>
alexeldeib|5 months ago
Reboots typically don't otherwise do anything special unless they also trigger a host migration. GCP live migration has some mention of support though
GCP mentions data persists across reboots here https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd#data_p...
note that stop/terminate via cloud APIs usually releases host capacity for other customers and would trigger data wipe, a guest initiated reboot typically will not.
commandersaki|5 months ago
munns|5 months ago
samlambert|5 months ago
fosterfriends|5 months ago
didip|5 months ago
primitivesuave|5 months ago
1. https://planetscale.com/pricing?architecture=x86-64&cluster=...
achristmascarl|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
awaseem|5 months ago
mattrobenolt|5 months ago
samlambert|5 months ago
Imustaskforhelp|5 months ago
I read the comments and it seems that in one of them they mention between supabase vs planetscale postgres that maybe they can use a project like supabase and then come to planetscale when their project grows enough to support that decision.
How would a migration from supabase to planetscale even go and at what scale would something like that be remotely better i suppose.
Great project tho and I hope that planetscale's team doesn't get bored listening to all requests asking for a free tier like me, maybe I am addicted on those sweet freebies!
samlambert|5 months ago
boxed|5 months ago
sgammon|5 months ago
ksec|5 months ago
yohbho|5 months ago
Ah, overlooked first sentence, read only all headings and navigation and footer:
> is now generally available and out of private preview
t_sawyer|5 months ago
gigatexal|5 months ago
jerrygoyal|5 months ago
sgammon|5 months ago
phplovesong|5 months ago
samlambert|5 months ago