PlanetScale is now generally available • Hacker News Board

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#31

Post by spelunker » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #17

pm90 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Pay for only what you use” database.

I'm curious about what kind of workloads people would be using a serverless DB for? If I understand it correctly, let's say my DB is only being used to process 1M transactions from 9am-1pm, I'm basically only paying for the load during that time, versus a managed DB where it's being paid to be on 24/7. With most serverless there is a penalty though - cold startup. So is it purely an economic play for esoteric DB work…

Lower operational burden - if you're using a serverless db maintaining servers is one less thing to think about. Same with any infrastructure - you don't have to worry about orchestration, load balancing, authentication, etc.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#32

Post by moralestapia » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

zild3d wrote: post #26

moralestapia wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't provision and manage the infrastructure associated with your DB. Someone else does it for you and you just focus on querying/storing the data and whatever else your business requires you to do.

Not provisioning & managing is part of it, but the pricing model is important too. e.g. RDS and Mongo Atlas are managed database services so you're not provisioning and managing the infra, but you are paying for dedicated machines and their sizes, etc.

>but you are paying for dedicated machines and their sizes

I see this as provision & managing as well, but yes I see your point. Ultimately it's about the user only caring about its data and nothing else (to the extent possible).

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#33

Post by sergiotapia » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

Warning: One misconfiguration of your database and you will get hammered by billing.

One guy forgot to put foreign keys and got a $20,000 bill.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#34

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #20

epberry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The referential integrity piece (otherwise known as Foreign Keys) will not be addressed and is a limitation - some might say feature - of Vitess. They wrote a pretty good piece about it here, https://docs.planetscale.com/tutorials/operating-without-for...

Thanks, that looks pretty useful. To me, this means that planetscale (and vitess) immediately become less useful for a large class of applications: existing apps that use an RDBMS that you want to scale. Because most existing apps will expect FKs. I haven't tested my employer's application (which has FKs) to see what will happen, but I doubt it will be smooth sailing. But there's probably plenty of greenfield develop…

[deleted]

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#35

Post by cyounkins » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

I'm skeptical that YouTube would be using this for anything remotely significant given Google's strong propensity to only use internal technologies that they fully control.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#36

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #20

epberry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The referential integrity piece (otherwise known as Foreign Keys) will not be addressed and is a limitation - some might say feature - of Vitess. They wrote a pretty good piece about it here, https://docs.planetscale.com/tutorials/operating-without-for...

Thanks, that looks pretty useful. To me, this means that planetscale (and vitess) immediately become less useful for a large class of applications: existing apps that use an RDBMS that you want to scale. Because most existing apps will expect FKs. I haven't tested my employer's application (which has FKs) to see what will happen, but I doubt it will be smooth sailing. But there's probably plenty of greenfield develop…

[deleted]

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#37

Post by qaq » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

cyounkins wrote: post #35

I'm skeptical that YouTube would be using this for anything remotely significant given Google's strong propensity to only use internal technologies that they fully control.

This was opensourced by google founders were @ google and wrote the thing

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#38

Post by dewey » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

gh123man wrote: post #14

This seems cool. I am currently shopping around for a cheap managed database for an app I am launching soon (and bootstrapping - so cost is a concern right now). We are starting small but want room to grow. The free tier looks really promising! Especially compared to some of the entry level plans on other cloud providers. Can anyone who has tried Planetscale and compared it to other managed database solutions tell me…

I think going for a speciality database at this stage is premature optimization. Go with the safe choice (Existing tooling, knowledge, free tiers) and use Postgres or something else established. Later on you can always move workloads to other databases if needed.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#39

Post by tonyhb » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #12

mooreds wrote: post #2

If you don't know what PlanetScale is, it is a serverless database offering. It is compatible with MySQL and offers lots of tooling on top of it. More here: https://docs.planetscale.com/ When I looked at it a few months ago, it had some limitations (lack of referential integrity, MySQL version compatibility) but I'm not sure if they've been addressed (or, in some cases, if they are possible to address). Anyway, alway…

I wonder how this stacks up against CockroachDB.

To the best of my knowledge the scaling behind distributed ranged KV stores (which cockroachDB uses as its storage engine) is easier to manage overall. Whether that's important for "serverless" is another question.

I'm sure PlanetScale will help with rebalancing and re-sharding but, just like FoundationDB, CockroachDB "promises" to automatically re-shard hot keys and ranges for you under the hood, and so _in theory_ scales well for a distributed read/write heavy system over many nodes with potential hotspots. My CockroachDB knowledge is based off of research into FoundationDB, but I think it shares many of the same underpinnings (even the record layer concept). And FoundationDB scales very well.

Vitess, on the other hand, manages the cluster for you but I don't think that the rebalancing and sharding is as easy to manage. Would love to learn more as I don't know much about Vitess.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#40

Post by remorses » Tue, Nov 16, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

gh123man wrote: post #14

This seems cool. I am currently shopping around for a cheap managed database for an app I am launching soon (and bootstrapping - so cost is a concern right now). We are starting small but want room to grow. The free tier looks really promising! Especially compared to some of the entry level plans on other cloud providers. Can anyone who has tried Planetscale and compared it to other managed database solutions tell me…

It is pretty awesome

The dashboard is clean and easy to navigate

The branching feature is really good idea, it allows you to confidently run migrations with no downtime

The daily backups are also great, no additional steps to set them up

They also have a graph to check query latency which is nice

The only downside is that they dont have foreign keys but I used prisma referential integrity for that so not really an issue for me