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The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

planetscale.com

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Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#11

Post by mattrobenolt »

gsanderson wrote: post #8

This is great! Potentially the missing piece in the world of "serverless": a serverless SQL database accessible over HTTP with no minimum price. I saw AWS Aurora has a Data API but currently that does have a minimum monthly cost. Fauna is possibly the closest, but that appears to involve translating SQL to its FQL. How stable is the beta?

Our beta for this is pretty stable. The only real instabilities are around the underlying APIs we use, which is part of why we're not ready to document it just yet.

But the underlying tech is exactly the same as we use for handling traditional MySQL connections, so there isn't anything to fear.

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#12

Post by yonixw »

gsanderson wrote: post #8

This is great! Potentially the missing piece in the world of "serverless": a serverless SQL database accessible over HTTP with no minimum price. I saw AWS Aurora has a Data API but currently that does have a minimum monthly cost. Fauna is possibly the closest, but that appears to involve translating SQL to its FQL. How stable is the beta?

It's 90% there... but not allowing foreign keys [1] (=cascading delete) means that this solution becomes equal with DynamoDB (Serverless + Scale to 0 as well) because products will either be built for it from day one or never support it with a full fledged DB server instance that is 100% up in mind. Unfortunately, didn't find a lot in-between.

[1] https://planetscale.com/docs/learn/operating-without-foreign...

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#13

Post by mattrobenolt »

mattrobenolt wrote: post #9
brundolf wrote: post #6

Curious what the performance impact is of replacing TCP with HTTP for this kind of thing

Great question! Author of a lot of the infrastructure surrounding this here. I plan on following up with a more technical deep dive on some of these aspects, but it's quite a bit hard to do a 1:1 comparison. While, obviously, HTTP also uses TCP, I'm going to assume you're asking more about the binary MySQL protocol vs HTTP. On the surface, yes, HTTP is going to have more overhead with headers and the other aspects th…

There are, in my opinion, a few other concrete benefits outside of performance too that I didn't touch on. I plan on touching on them more in my follow up blog post though.

A lot of this for me/us at this point is still theoretical since we don't have tons of application yet. Serverless was an easy first target since they require HTTP as the transport. The real experiments will come when we say, put together a Python or Go driver based on these APIs and compare side by side to a native MySQL driver.

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#14

Post by joshstrange »

gsanderson wrote: post #8

This is great! Potentially the missing piece in the world of "serverless": a serverless SQL database accessible over HTTP with no minimum price. I saw AWS Aurora has a Data API but currently that does have a minimum monthly cost. Fauna is possibly the closest, but that appears to involve translating SQL to its FQL. How stable is the beta?

I mean I'm using PlanetScale with Prisma ORM on AWS Lambda right now without issue. Unlike many DB providers, PlanetScale supports nearly unlimited connections. I think I saw in their docs they have a soft-limit of something like 250K connections.

I used Aurora Data API before moving off Aurora Serverless (insane pricing) to Prisma and PlanetScale, I don't think I'd go back to the HTTP API as Prisma works very well and I enjoy using it. One downside to Prisma is the DB "engine" is a arch-specific (obviously) binary that is pretty hefty. I want to say ~50MB. That can be a killer in serverless but I was able to work around it without much issue. If I ever wanted to dive into the world of Lambda layers I could probably move it into it's own later (however that still counts towards your max lambda size).

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#15

Post by joshstrange »

Very cool and lightweight way to talk to PlanetScale but for now I'll stick with Prisma. Prisma is much heavier (engine weighs in at ~50MB) and that can be a non-starter for serverless in some cases but it works for me on AWS Lambda.

The nice thing about PlanetScale is you get nearly unlimited connections (soft limit of like 250K IIRC) so making 1 connection per active lambda isn't a problem at all.

I've been using PlanetScale since shortly after they went GA and I've been very happy so far. Cheaper than Aurora Serverless, less hassle, and the branching feature is super cool. Zero-downtime deploys, with rollback support, feel magical.

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#16

Post by joshstrange »

k__ wrote: post #10
gsanderson wrote: post #8

This is great! Potentially the missing piece in the world of "serverless": a serverless SQL database accessible over HTTP with no minimum price. I saw AWS Aurora has a Data API but currently that does have a minimum monthly cost. Fauna is possibly the closest, but that appears to involve translating SQL to its FQL. How stable is the beta?

But it doesn't seem to habe serverless/pay-as-you-go pricing.

That's fair and since my use of PlanetScale is very burst-y I do wish there was a cheaper option for the vast majority of the time when I don't need to scale but at $30/mo it's much cheaper than Aurora Serverless and I'm not aware of many other "serverless" db's, let alone cheaper ones (that are still MySQL).

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#17

Post by samlambert »

k__ wrote: post #10
gsanderson wrote: post #8

This is great! Potentially the missing piece in the world of "serverless": a serverless SQL database accessible over HTTP with no minimum price. I saw AWS Aurora has a Data API but currently that does have a minimum monthly cost. Fauna is possibly the closest, but that appears to involve translating SQL to its FQL. How stable is the beta?

But it doesn't seem to habe serverless/pay-as-you-go pricing.

We do have pay as you go pricing.

Re: The PlanetScale serverless driver for JavaScript

#18

Post by mattrobenolt »

joshstrange wrote: post #15

Very cool and lightweight way to talk to PlanetScale but for now I'll stick with Prisma. Prisma is much heavier (engine weighs in at ~50MB) and that can be a non-starter for serverless in some cases but it works for me on AWS Lambda. The nice thing about PlanetScale is you get nearly unlimited connections (soft limit of like 250K IIRC) so making 1 connection per active lambda isn't a problem at all. I've been using P…

We didn't talk much about this yet, but the underlying tech for this will help you within Lambda too reduce latency even over normal MySQL.

This specifically is targeting environments where a MySQL client isn't able to run.

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