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Folks, your blog post sucks at marketing.

Edit: your marketing site actually has excellent marketing information.

Edit #2: They've since replaced the blog post with a link to the marketing page. Good reaction time.

I scrolled through the landing page and even the "Get started" page and I have still no idea what is this. Is this a managed db? Something I can run myself? No idea.

The landing page which is linked at the start of the second sentence of this page…? I don’t completely disagree with you, but this is mostly hypertext working as intended, is it not?

Assuming it works the same way as their MySQL product, Vitess:

The usual way to run it is that you partition your db based on something like a user, so that single user gets a consistent DB, but anything cross-shard may not be.

I know when I worked at Block, Cashapp was using Vitess and getting cross-shard DB writes down and functioning correctly was one of the major blockers to adoption. (though I just did tls management for vitess and didn't write any workloads on top of it, so my impression might be a bit off)

Same here, first thing I need to know when considering a distributed system is how consistency is handled. If it's eventual consistency, what is the replication lag like? If it's strong consistency, can their network handle that? What happens when a node goes down?

Every PlanetScale launch seems to come with a side of beef with the competition. Case in point: https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098069474205470970?s=20

Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.

How does open source have anything to do with Neki's ability to scale against a service that doesn't even do sharding.

Do they get the same backlash if they went with a source available license similar to MongoDB or Elastic?

They have made it proprietary so that providers like AWS can't build their own service with it, thus eating into PS's income.

Google is big enough to survive open-sourcing Vitess, k8s, angular, etc. Planetscale isn't.

have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?

don't worry, we still give a lot of love to vitess. at the end of the day they are both databases. the beauty of doing both is we can take learnings from each product and apply it to the other.

https://neki.dev/ is a much more terse overview of neki

If I don't know what I'm reading about by the third or fourth phrase, I skip it. Empty language comes from empty minds and I don't have time for that.

Bus ads have been running for a little while now. A few billboards around too.

You can also find that in first section of the linked post (after the intro)...

it works and does sharding

I actually wrote a bit about this on our blog! https://planetscale.com/blog/the-history-of-postgres-shardin...

The first thing I want to know when looking at a distributed system is how consistency is handled, ctrl+f for "consis" on both the blog post and neki.dev has zero hits. So I can only assume it will have eventual consistency with a considerable replica lag for real-time systems.

It doesn’t take a marketing person to submit a link.

The largest database to ever run on Aurora MySQL runs on PlanetScale, and the largest database to ever run on Aurora limitless also runs on PlanetScale.

We went as far as we could on GCP before PlanetScale. Spanner is amazing but also amazingly expensive. And CloudSQL, also amazing as long as you don’t need write scaling. PlanetScale (Vitess+MySQL plus their branching / deployment and monitoring tools) is just not a combination offered on GCP. And while I didn’t use Aurora, from talking to and exploring AWS it doesn’t really have this combination either.

Cross shard transactions are “coming soon”. So, this is just like having multiple postgres clusters.

That is what the “regular” PlanetScale is all about. It uses the Vitess open source project to do write scaling through shading. It is very powerful and customizable and stable. It was built to run YouTube. Former happy user here.

Vitess/Planetscale? Neki is essentially a version of Vitess for Postgres fom the same guys.

TiDB: Distributed and MySQL compatible

MariaDB Galera or Vitess.

Multigres is the one that comes to mind

lol are you an amazon customer?

undecided right now

thank you!

i have been struggling to hire enough physicists

Sam is not an asshole. His twitter is great, he's definitely opinionated, and if you haven't had the luck of meeting him you might misread his tone as grumpy. It's not. It's sarcastic/dry humour and honest.

They build good stuff and care.

He's actually quite nice over zoom so he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.

I can fully understand why someone would think that.

Genuine question, since I'm a little out of the loop; why do you say that?

I, for one, like it when CEOs let loose a bit and show some personality. It's better than everyone walking around talking like a media trained robot.