PlanetScale for Postgres

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?

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.

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.