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PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA
- didip 1y agoIf you are on AWS anyway, I am curious why not just use Aurora Postgres?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- achristmascarl 1y agoI haven't used PlanetScale before, but AWS Aurora limits IOPS and network performance based on your instance size, so you end up in scenarios where you really wish you had more throughput, but sizing up your instance would be a very, very expensive solution
- primitivesuave 1y agoI use Aurora Postgres at work, where we pay approximately 9x more for equivalent resources to PlanetScale (according to their pricing page [1]). This is not an endorsement of PlanetScale as I've never used it, just pointing out that the premium for using Aurora Postgres is many multiples higher than virtually every other Postgres provider. 1. https://planetscale.com/pricing?architecture=x86-64&cluster=PS-640&storage=1500&backup=20 https://planetscale.com/pricing?architecture=x86-64&cluster=...
- samlambert 1y agoPlease reach out to us we would love to talk to you about testing PlanetScale and seeing if we can drive your costs down and performance up.
- samlambert 1y agoIf anyone has questions about our Postgres product please feel free to ask. I will be around to answer.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoPostgres (esoterically?) has some issues with index bloat on high-insert workloads, does PlanetScale do anything special to tune for this by default, since it caters to higher-perf workloads (over something like supabase)?
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoOn another, similar, vein - i'd be curious to know if XID wraparound and auto vacuum tuning was something you had to advise customers on up front consdering how often that issue rears its head for the same kinds of workloads.
- samlambert 1y agoWe don't do anything special (yet) but we do have bloat detection that we warn you about. We've noticed that autovacuum works very well on our Metal product because of the extra resources.
- hollylawly 1y agoMore information about bloat detection here: https://planetscale.com/docs/postgres/monitoring/schema-recommendations#how-planetscale-detects-index-bloat https://planetscale.com/docs/postgres/monitoring/schema-reco...
- petergeoghegan 1y agoCan you provide more detail/a reference? I've done extensive work on improving the Postgres B-Tree code, over quite a number of releases. I'm not aware of any problems with high-insert workloads in particular. I have personally fixed a number of subtle issues that could lead to lower space utilization with such workloads [1][2] in the past, though. if there's a remaining problem in this area, then I'd very much like to know about it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RaATILoiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RaATILoiE [2] https://speakerdeck.com/peterg/nbtree-arch-pgcon https://speakerdeck.com/peterg/nbtree-arch-pgcon
- commandersaki 1y agoThis title is very confusing; no company is affiliated with the release of postgresql.
- samlambert 1y agocorrected. thank you
- munns 1y agoThanks for that callout, absolutely right. Fixed!
- ritzaco 1y agoThis seems to be mainly aimed at existing PlanetScale customers. > To create a Postgres database, sign up or log in to your PlanetScale account, create a new database, and select Postgres. It does mention the sign up option but doesn't really give me much context about pricing or what it is. I know a bit, but I get confused by different database offerings, so it seems like a missed opportunity to give me two more sentences of context and some basic pricing - what's the easiest way for me to try this if I'm curious? On the pricing page I can start selecting regions and moving slides to create a plan from $39/month and up, but I couldn't easily find an answer to if there's a free trial or cheaper way to 'give it a spin' without committing.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoPlanetScale isnt' really designed for the "ill give it a go" casual customer that might use supabase It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass
- ritzaco 1y agobusinesses that 'need to haul ass' usually still want to try something out before buying it. That doesn't need to a a free plan, but it's common to offer some trial period to new users. Also totally OK if planetscale doesn't do this and that $39/month _is_ the best way to try them out, I just think it would be good for them to make explicit in the article what I should do if I think I might want it but want to try it.
- rcrowley 1y agoAll our list prices are monthly and our bills are actually even finer-grained - there's no commitment to pay for a database longer than you run it. If you do decide to operate on PlanetScale long-term, check out <https://planetscale.com/pricing https://planetscale.com/pricing> for consumption commitment discounting and other options that might make sense for your company.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoThey try it by contacting sales and setting up a pilot, not a self-service free trial
- vmg12 1y agoHow does planetscale for postgres scale? I understand that it's multi node postgres with automatic failover but I think it only really scales for reads and not writes? So is the only way to scale writes horizontally to shard?
- samlambert 1y agoKind of. For horizontally scaling writes we are building the Vitess for Postgres which we are calling Neki https://www.neki.dev/ https://www.neki.dev/ The product we are GA'ing today has the option of PlanetScale Metal which is extremely fast and scales write QPS further than any of the other single-primary Postgres hosts.
- vmg12 1y agoThanks for the response, this clarifies things for me because I thought this was already a vitess for postgress implementation. Awesome to hear that this is coming.
- bekacru 1y agoWe’ve had early access to it for a while now, we’re already running a lot of performance critical workloads on it and it’s been working wonderfully. Congrats sam and the team on setting a new standard for what highly performant managed Postgres should look like :)
- t43562 1y agoI don't know why but I can almost never understand American commercial software websites. "what is PlanetScale".....blah, blah blah....WHOOOOSH! No more enlightened than before. Even for products I've worked on - I read the page and can't recognise the thing I'm working on from the description..... Postgres is involved somehow. I get that.
- gpi 1y agoBut it's done at a scale that's planetscale
- mousetree 1y agois this web scale?
- raffraffraff 1y agoIt's not as fast as dev null though
- sgammon 1y agoplanet bigger than web
- dfee 1y agoi'll take the opposite side. i was very impressed with their website. the very first line: > The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases the second line: > PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding. i know exactly what they do. zero fluff. and, i'm now interested. https://planetscale.com/ https://planetscale.com/
- odie5533 1y agoHow is this different than Aurora Postgres or RDS Postgres?
- anthonyronning 1y agoBeen running it for a few months now, such a great and reliable product. Congrats on the release!
- fosterfriends 1y agoCongrats on the launch Sam! Excited to try it out for Graphite's production DB
- theanirudh 1y agoWe just migrated to PlanetScale Postgres Metal over the weekend. We are already seeing major query improvements. The migration was pretty smooth. Post-migration we hit a few issues (turned out it wasn't an issue with PlanetScale), and the PlanetScale team jumped in immediately to help us out, even on a Saturday morning so support's been amazing. The Insights tab also surfaced missing indexes we added, which sped things up further. Early days, but so far so good.
- benterix 1y agoOut of curiosity: how do you connect your databases to external services that are consuming these data? In places I do similar work, databases are usually in the same private network as the instances which are reading and writing data to them. If you put them somewhere on the internet, apart from security, doesn't it affect latency?
- oefrha 1y agoPlanetScale runs in AWS/GCP, so not really “somewhere on the internet” if your workload is already there.
- theanirudh 1y agoTheir 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.
- sreekanth850 1y agoNo 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 planetscale server that create transaction overhead. Complex transactions with multiple statements can amplify this latency due to this round trip. But you could potentially reduce this latency by hosting your app near to where planet scale host their DB cluster though. But that is a dependency or compromise. Edit: A few writes per second? Probably fine. Hundreds of writes per second? Those extra milliseconds become a real bottleneck.
- awaseem 1y agoMight be a dumb question, but what is metal? Are you folks hosting DBs on your own infra or still going through AWS/GCP
- mattrobenolt 1y agoIt's still AWS/GCP, but it uses instance types with local NVMes.
- arandomhuman 1y agoso it's a "bare metal" virtual machine? Or are they actually using the bare metal offerings for the cloud provider?
- bddicken 1y agoStill in virtual machines, but ones with local NVMe drives rather than network-attached storage (EBS, Persistent Disk). This means incredible I/O performance. https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres
- samlambert 1y agohosting on AWS/GCP on the ephemeral NVMe nodes. https://planetscale.com/metal https://planetscale.com/metal
- n_u 1y agoA couple dumb questions: 1. You say "ephemeral", but my understanding is that NVMe is non-volatile so upon crash and restart we should be able to recover the state of the memory. Is is ephemeral because of how EC2 works where you might not get that same physical box and memory addresses back? 2. Can you explain what "Semi-synchronous replication" is? Your docs say "This ensures every write has reached stable storage in two availability zones before it’s acknowledged to the client." but I would call that synchronous since the write is blocked until it is replicated. Thanks!
- fourseventy 1y agoThe way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?
- alexeldeib 1y agocan't speak to GCP specifically but usually the issue is they are host-attached and can't be migrated, so need to be wiped on VM termination or migration -- that's when you lose data. Reboots typically don't otherwise do anything special unless they also trigger a host migration. GCP live migration has some mention of support though GCP mentions data persists across reboots here https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd#data_persistence https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd#data_p... note that stop/terminate via cloud APIs usually releases host capacity for other customers and would trigger data wipe, a guest initiated reboot typically will not.
- mattrobenolt 1y agoWe deal with this by always running 3 nodes in a cluster, one per AZ, and strong backup/restore processes. So yes, the data per-node is ephemeral, but it is redundant and durable for the whole cluster.
- bourbonproof 1y agoDo I understand this right: if these 3 nodes shutdown for some reason, all data is lost and you have to actually restore from backup instead of just starting the machine again. And even if you have to restart one node (due to updates, or crashes) you also have to restore from backup? If so, why not pick a hosting provider that doesn't wipe the disk when machine shuts down?
- mattrobenolt 1y agoIt's more than just shutting down. You'd have to have an actual failure. Data isn't lost on a simple restart. It'd require 3 nodes to die in 3 different AZs. While that's not impossible, the reality is that's very low. So simply restarting nodes wouldn't trigger restoring from backup, but yes, in our case, replacing nodes entirely does require that node to restore from a backup/WALs and catch back up in replication. EBS doesn't entirely just solve this, you still have failures and still need/want to restore from backups. This is built into our product as a fundamental feature. It's transparent to users, but the upside is that restoring from backups and creating backups is tested every day multiple times per day for a database. We aren't afraid of restoring from backups and replacing nodes by choice or by failure. It's the same to us. We do all of the same operations already on EBS. This magic is what enables us to be able to use NVMe's since we treat EBS as ephemeral already.
- yohbho 1y agoDid they rename to GA, did a company named GA buy them, or are they general availability, i.e. 1.0 out, or "not closed beta" ? Ah, overlooked first sentence, read only all headings and navigation and footer: > is now generally available and out of private preview
- ProofHouse 1y agoNot a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!
- ProofHouse 1y agoI mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar; What is PlanetScale for Postgres? Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.
- dkhenry 1y agoI would just point out that its Hosted Postgres. If your looking for a how I think you have the wrong mental model. Its hosted Postgres, there are some nuance there as to why it would perform differently from RDS on Amazon, or CloudSQL on GCP, but its not some novel new technology that needs a long description. If you are interested in their new technology that extends on hosted postgres check out Neki https://www.neki.dev/ https://www.neki.dev/
- tjoekbezoer 1y agoWell, above the fold in the chapter 'What is PlanetScale for Postgres?' the second paragraph mentions custom operator. That makes me assume it is kubernetes.
- samlambert 1y agoit is kubernetes
- brettgriffin 1y ago
- ohxh 1y agoTook a while to find on their website but here’s a benchmark vs AWS Aurora: https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora Seems a bit better, but they benchmarked on a kind of small db (500gb db / db.r8g.xlarge)
- rcrowley 1y agoFair to say 500GB is small, especially compared to some of the folks who've already migrated, but do note that it's 15x RAM on the benchmark machines, so we really were testing the whole database and not just the memory bandwidth of the CPUs.
- phplovesong 1y agoThe elephant in the room is you cant use FKs when you go planetscale. This has a huge impact on how you design your database.
- samlambert 1y agoNot true and has never been true for Postgres. Vitess was like this for a while but we shipped FKs for Vitess 2 years ago.
- sgammon 1y agoevery time i use planetscale it works flawlessly. great news!
- boxed 1y agoCan 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...
- sgammon 1y agoyes, you can pick a cloud provider and region, and you can deploy replicas to other regions
- boxed 1y agoThat'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.
- sgammon 1y agoVague how? Your issue is that the major cloud providers can’t tell you where specifically your server is located? I don’t get it
- boxed 1y agoWell... yea. A db is nice and all, but if you can't predictably host it somewhere where you can finely control the latency, you're gonna suffer.
- sgammon 1y agowith long-running TLS connections this really isn't an issue; turn keepalives on and the connection generally stays hot. grpc over TLS also means features like resumption / TLS ticketing also work. i used to think this way, and then i tried it, and i have to admit it's pretty good. think of all the complexity on the other side of running a stable multi-regional database: networking, disk failure, routing, caching. all of that is negated. so yes, there is some latency, but not as much as you think, and honestly, i'd make the trade again in a heartbeat.
- qaq 1y agoWonder how https://github.com/multigres/multigres https://github.com/multigres/multigres vs PlanetScale will pay out eventually.
- gigatexal 1y agothis is still using the OLTP engine though right? Can you use planetscale Postgres with any of the OLAP backends? Can I install the duckdb extension and get OLAP for free plus all the planetscale goodness?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI really wish that the hobby tier hadn't gone but I also understand that planetscale is a b2b which imo I can respect yet still wish if I can try things in a hobby tier... I read the comments and it seems that in one of them they mention between supabase vs planetscale postgres that maybe they can use a project like supabase and then come to planetscale when their project grows enough to support that decision. How would a migration from supabase to planetscale even go and at what scale would something like that be remotely better i suppose. Great project tho and I hope that planetscale's team doesn't get bored listening to all requests asking for a free tier like me, maybe I am addicted on those sweet freebies!
- samlambert 1y agowe've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload.
- gtowey 1y agoHey Sam! Congrats on the launch!
- samlambert 1y agoThank you Gavin! I hope you are well.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoCongrats on the launch and thanks for responding! I will try to create a product one day that will have a supabase -> planetscale migration one day to know that I have made it lol (jk) have a nice day
- bentohn 1y agoWe were in the beta for this and they've been great. We're presently in a migration for our larger instances on Heroku, but were able to test on a new product (fairly high writes/IOPs) and it's been nice to have more control vs. Heroku (specifically, ability to just buy more IOPs or storage). Had one incident during the beta which we believed we caused on our own but within 5 minutes of pinging them they had thrown multiple engineers on it to debug and resolve quickly. For me, that's the main thing I care about with managed DB services as most tech is commoditization at this point. Just wish the migration path from Heroku was a tad easier (Heroku blocks logical replication on all instances) but pushing through anyway because I want to use the metal offering.
- jerrygoyal 1y agoWe use Supabase Postgres for our production database. What are the pros and cons of switching to PlanetScale Postgres?
- ksec 1y agoPlanetscale's Neki, Postgres 18, OrioleDB. Give it ~3 more years may be we can finally leave MySQL behind unless Oracle decide to do a 180 degree U turn.
- t_sawyer 1y agoPlanetScale created a business and profited off of an open source product called vitess from Google which is why they originally only supported mysql. Would love for them to open source their solution for postgres.