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PlanetScale – Database for Developers

planetscale.com

31–40 of 135 posts

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free tier provides the stated usage levels at no cost, indefinitely. So if you were to stay under the quotas of data size, writes and reads, you don't pay at all. When you go over, you just pay for what you use. No servers, no pre-committed capacity, just simply pay for what you use.

Does it mean you can write 10 million rows every month for free or does it mean you can write ten million rows, however many months that may take, and then pay for all use after that. The first one is how pricing generally works, but the page could be read as the second.

This is monthly. :)

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#32

Can I install this locally? Will it work without an internet connection? Is it fully open source? From what I can tell, the answer to all three questions is no. Is it yet another example of vendor lock-in? Yes.

There is still value in proprietary solutions that offer significant time/money savings vs open source. Not all of us have infinite resources to develop and maintain every solution in-house, whether that's an auto-scaling database or email or Google Docs or whatever.

For small/medium businesses, sometimes it's better just to let the experts do their thing and build on top of it...

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#33
post #25

Wondering will we see something like this for Postgres? I like the cool things but I can’t migrate to MySQL just because of this.

looks like it's a ways off... planetscale says they're built on vitess, and vitess has postgres compatibility at the bottom of their "Medium Term" roadmap: https://vitess.io/docs/resources/roadmap/

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#34
Can someone please explain how Vitess works, in plain English? How does it magically make MySQL scale?

And then what does PlanetScale add on top of Vitess hosted anywhere else?

Sorry, the linked blog post is both very abstract and assumes a high level of preexisting knowledge about database scaling.

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great! One question about pricing -- I can't tell if the "free" tier costs are for one month, or ongoing. That is, do you get the free tier amounts for one month and then pay from then on, or is that level of service free from then on?

The free tier is free forever.

> free forever

or as long as a free tier exists ;-)

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great! One question about pricing -- I can't tell if the "free" tier costs are for one month, or ongoing. That is, do you get the free tier amounts for one month and then pay from then on, or is that level of service free from then on?

The free tier is free forever.

Free until you decide it isn't free anymore.

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#38

Can someone please explain how Vitess works, in plain English? How does it magically make MySQL scale? And then what does PlanetScale add on top of Vitess hosted anywhere else? Sorry, the linked blog post is both very abstract and assumes a high level of preexisting knowledge about database scaling.

IME the answer to "how did they make [hard to scale thing] easily scalable?" is usually that they introduce limitations in how you can use [hard to scale thing] so you can't use it in ways that are hard to scale, then automate scaling it in well-known ways for use cases that are so-limited. Vitesse's site mentions that it relies on horizontal sharding, so right off the bat, my guess is that you can't use it in ways that are sharding-unfriendly, or if you can then you'll be met with restrictions on much of the "magic" of it if you do.

Rarely is it the case that someone's actually discovered e.g. novel math or something to make the hard part easier. Better tools (to do well-understood things more easily for this use case) and restrictions (so you don't use it in ways the tools can't handle) are the usual way.

Re: PlanetScale – Database for Developers

#39

Can someone please explain how Vitess works, in plain English? How does it magically make MySQL scale? And then what does PlanetScale add on top of Vitess hosted anywhere else? Sorry, the linked blog post is both very abstract and assumes a high level of preexisting knowledge about database scaling.

Vitess is an additional layer on top of MySQL which all queries pass though. Among other things, it implements its own query parser which can then do stuff like split a query across shards and join results etc.

I wouldn't say there's too much "magic" in there, but it does a lot of known difficult things (schema management, sharding/resharding, connection pooling, query optimization, DB administration, monitoring, backup/failover) which are generally painful and expensive to do yourself.

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