[HN Gopher] PlanetScale for Postgres
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PlanetScale for Postgres
Author : adocomplete
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-07-01 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (planetscale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (planetscale.com)
| kellysutton wrote:
| As a PlanetScale MySQL user for the past 2 years, this is really
| exciting for the Postgres community. (Worked at a company that
| ran both, was a bummer our tooling didn't match.)
|
| Using PlanetScale for db management is like using an iPhone after
| being accustomed to a Treo. The experience is just better in
| every way.
|
| Congrats to the PlanetScale team!
| samlambert wrote:
| We've really enjoyed working with Postgres to bring this product
| to market. I am here if anyone has questions.
| theanirudh wrote:
| I see benchmarks against Aurora, but I'm curious to see how
| this compares to Aurora Optimized reads which caches data in a
| local NVMe SSD.
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...
| ezekg wrote:
| Some cool scaling stuff [0] [1] coming out for pg lately. Looking
| forward to seeing what PS builds here, I've been a big fan for
| awhile.
|
| Would love more details tbh, but will be watching regardless.
|
| [0]: https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgres
|
| [1]: https://pgdog.dev
| simonw wrote:
| PlanetScale came out of Vitess, which was _very_ MySQL-specific.
|
| Does this new PostgreSQL offering share any heritage with Vitess
| or is this an entirely new piece of technology, or based on other
| components that PlanetScale have written since the Vitess days
| that aren't direct descendants?
|
| Update: to answer my own question
| https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres#vitess...
|
| > _Vitess' achievements are enabled by leveraging MySQL's
| strengths and engineering around its weaknesses. To achieve
| Vitess' power for Postgres we are architecting from first
| principles. We are well under way with building this new system
| and will be releasing more information and early access as we
| progress._
| samlambert wrote:
| Simon I am a huge fan of your work. If you create a PlanetScale
| org and email me the name I will give you early access (free on
| us of course) s@planetscale.com
| wasd wrote:
| Congratulations! What's the availability of extensions? Any
| limitations worth knowing about?
| brycethornton wrote:
| Really cool. It'll be interesting to see how Multigres (by
| Supabase) shapes up compared to this. I think it's great to have
| more/better competitive hosted Postgres offerings.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| off-topic, but from the same website: this gem
| https://planetscale.com/learn/courses/mysql-for-developers
| aarondf wrote:
| Hey, that's me! Glad you liked it :)
| ff4 wrote:
| PlanetScale's move is intriguing, but sharding data across nodes
| is where the real challenge lies. Are the trade-offs similar to
| Vitess with MySQL, or does Postgres's feature richness complicate
| things further?
|
| When data grows beyond a single machine, the hard work begins.
| Distributed systems sacrifice features like complex joins,
| extensions, and strong consistency. Maybe they should get Jepsen
| to poke at their setup. Who can show us what we lose compared to
| standard Postgres?
| ff4 wrote:
| MySQL compatibility documentation
| https://planetscale.com/docs/vitess/troubleshooting/mysql-co...
| exists, it's not clear how that translates. I anticipate that
| even with a Postgres protocol, the practical experience of
| using PlanetScale will be fundamentally different from standard
| Postgres.
| nickvanw wrote:
| Hi! I'm the CTO of PlanetScale - the PostgreSQL offering we
| launched today is built on top of pure Postgres and doesn't
| come with any limitations.
|
| The future sharded version will also be based on Postgres
| directly, and will be as compatible as possible. We're not
| looking to just speak the PG wire protocol to a different
| backend store.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I used PlanetScale or a year or two before switching to Neon. I
| needed 1 database per tenant and PlanetScale didn't support that
| (you had to pay $30/mo per database, now it looks like $39/mo).
| My use-case is weird and I also don't need powerful servers (in
| fact I'd just as well prefer to run multiple databases on 1
| server, I don't have a noisy-neighbor problem in my business).
| Neon let me do that but I couldn't on PS.
|
| I get it, I'm a small fish trying to pay a little as possible for
| fully managed postgres (or MySQL before I switched to Postgres
| when I moved to Neon) to run my small, bootstrapped company with
| spiky [0] but fairly predictable load.
|
| Best of luck to PlanetScale with this new offering, one day I
| hope I can use them again. I enjoyed the product and the support
| was great.
|
| [0] I write software for food festivals, 9 months out of the year
| there is no traffic, ~2 months of the year there is a tiny
| trickle, ~3 weeks seeing high (but not "high" by any definition)
| and then 1-5 days (depending on how long the event is) there is a
| good deal of load but still not more than the lowest tier can
| handle most of the time. Like I said, I'm a _small_ fish and I
| don't expect them to cater to me, I just know what I want and
| almost no one provides it directly.
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