Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
planetscale.com
Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#2I've been building a small personal app with PlanetScale and I like it a lot. Their way of doing schema branching works well, and is easy to use (though slightly tedious), and makes a lot of sense. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a pleased customer.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#3I've been following PlanetScale for a few years and interviewed their CTO Sugu last week: https://www.softwareatscale.dev/p/software-at-scale-29-sugu-..., if anyone's interested to hear their story of building Vitess for YouTube and some details on PlanetScale behind the scenes.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#4At Tiqets we have a different repo with SQL migrations using Flyway... ITs as simply as branching that repo, creating your migration. Getting the pipeline green and merging it back.
All migrations are automatically executed on production, pre-tested. Reviewed. No DB Administrator, No deployment together with the app.
It works quite well..
However, personally I really like not having to deal with schema changes. For example Firebase or Cloud DataStore is really nice... Its the best for developers, but not for data integrity.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#5Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#6Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
I had the impression they PS was interesting because they offer serverless SQL.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#7Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
Interesting, I'd be fascinated to hear what tech you use, because I've always had a really hard time with migrations.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#8Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
I had the impression they PS was interesting because they offer serverless SQL.
I've been PlanetScale for a test drive recently, and it's a bit of both. I also think they kind of go hand-in-hand: if you have "serverless" things (or just Docker), they can come and go with connections very quickly, so picking the correct "pause time" to take the DB down for an ALTER TABLE is possible but a tiny bit awkward. Online migrations mean you never take it down and it's always available so that's kind of moot.
But now you do have some other considerations (see below.) I don't think it's an absolute pancea, but it's certainly a very interesting and very useful secondary point in the design space. I like PlanetScale a lot. The free tier is also actually useful I think.
To be clear even if it's is "serverless SQL" you still have to design with the fact you're using Vitess in mind. So you have no foreign keys, scalability is done by keyspace sharding (not currently available in PlanetScale), apps deal with online migration where the schema evolves as they access it, etc. You have to keep these things in mind but you get some benefits in return, like most things.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#9Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
The database branching idea seems to be popping up more and more. IIRC, TermniusDB supports it too - https://terminusdb.com/
I've not played with PlanetScale yet, but I am planning on playing with TerminusDB in the near future.
Re: Building PlanetScale with PlanetScale
#10Personally, migrations have never been painful enough to warrant this sort of product. The idea of branching databases on the other hand is really cool. Is each branch a full copy? Seems like that would lead to huge storage needs for larger databases.
From what I understand, they only branch the schema. They don't copy the data.