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PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

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Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#171

Post by jashmatthews »

petergeoghegan wrote: post #170
dangoodmanUT wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a previous use case, when using postgres as a WAL-like append only store, I noticed that indexes would get massive. Then, after a while, they'd magically shrink. I had eventually switched to an API on top of Badger (golang KV), which afforded me an order of magnitude lower latency at ~30% of the resources IIRC. I'm sure there might have been some tuning I could have done to improve it. I've also heard similar beha…

> In a previous use case, when using postgres as a WAL-like append only store, I noticed that indexes would get massive. Then, after a while, they'd magically shrink. It's possible to recycle pages within indexes that have some churn (e.g., with workloads that use bulk range deletions). But it's not possible for indexes to shrink on their own, in a way that can be observed by monitoring the output of psql's "\di+" co…

Does vacuum not release free pages at the end of an index file in the same way it does for the heap?

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#172

Post by jashmatthews »

rcrowley wrote: post #161
sgarland wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So perfect for most web dev companies, then. “We handle FKs in the app for flexibility.” “And how many orphaned rows do you have?” “…”

The question isn't how many orphaned rows do you have, it's whether it matters. Databases are wonderful but they cannot maintain every invariant and they cannot express a whole application. They're one tool in the belt.

Most companies can afford not to give a shit until they hit SOC2 or GDPR compliance and then suddenly orphaned data is a giant liability.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#173

Post by diordiderot »

rimprobablyly wrote: post #124
intelekshual wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PlanetScale (famously?) deprecated their free "Hobby" tier (plus fired their sales & marketing teams) back in 2024 to achieve profitability https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever

> famously? Notoriously

Could you explain?

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#174

Post by Ozzie_osman »

samlambert wrote: post #2

If anyone has questions about our Postgres product please feel free to ask. I will be around to answer.

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.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#175

Post by pests »

n_u wrote: post #103
bri3d wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would highly recommend you read the docs on InnoDB locking then pick Postgres. This made me laugh pretty hard, but it's basically my take too. I'd pretty much go with the same thing. It's interesting to me, though, that people see Postgres as the "big database" and MySQL as the "hobby database." I basically see things as the exact opposite - Postgres is incredibly flexible, very nice to use, and these days, has f…

> This made me laugh pretty hard, but it's basically my take too. Haha glad you enjoyed it. > It's interesting to me, though, that people see Postgres as the "big database" and MySQL as the "hobby database." I basically see things as the exact opposite I agree. As I understand Postgres started as a challenger to SQL[1][2] with support for more complicated data types but then in the mid '90s they added SQL support and…

My reason for choosing MySQL in the early days was due to it being the default choice for PHP apps back in the day. Every tutorial, the mysql_ function, every app like Wordpress or anything else, and phpmysqladmin. Postgres was seen as more corporate / official / big boys club in my view… similar to how clickhouse was viewed here until recently.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#177

Post by boxed »

sgammon wrote: post #84
boxed wrote: post #83

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...

yes, you can pick a cloud provider and region, and you can deploy replicas to other regions

That's a bit vague isn't it? Certainly that does not mean putting something guaranteed even in the same data center, let alone the same rack.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#179

Post by aiisthefiture »

sreekanth850 wrote: post #167
theanirudh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their databases are hosted on AWS and GCP so latency isn't much of an issue. They also have AWS Private Link and if configured it won't go over the internet.

No matter if its hosted on Azure GCP or AWS, latency is real. Cloud providers doesn't magically eliminates the Geography and phhysics. Private network don't eliminates latency magically. In general, Any small latency hike can potentially create performance bottlenecks for write operations in strong consistency DB like postgres or MySQL because each write operation go through a round trip from your server to remote pl…

Your database will get slower before the latency is an issue.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#180

Post by ksec »

therein wrote: post #120
samlambert wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

happy to answer this with direct customer quotes from the companies you mentioned. all of these quotes are public: "We chose PlanetScale to host our most demanding Vitess and Postgres workloads, doing millions of queries per second on hundreds of terabytes of data." – Sualeh Asif - Chief Product Officer @Anysphere (Cursor) "Moving to PlanetScale added a 9 to our uptime." - Brian Scanlan @Intercom https://x.com/brian_…

> It seems like you are reaching pretty hard to find an issue with this statement. Your comment seems to come from a lack of experience scaling databases and not understanding how difficult it is to do what we've done in partnership with our customers. Either that or deep or a high level of insincerity. Up until this, I was gonna say, fair enough, I appreciate the direct replies from the staff. But this paragraph set…

>But this paragraph settles it for me: PlanetScale as a company has a narcissistic personality which is fine for some I guess. Hopefully one day you will have a product that justifies that huge ego.

What you wrote earlier.

>Did any of these companies reach out to them and say "you know, we wouldn't have been able to scale beyond our previous limits without you, thank you so much guys you saved us". If not, this is so insincere that it is cringe.

I guess I will let the rest of HN be the judge.

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