Neki is sharded Postgres by PlanetScale

99 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by handfuloflight
(neki.dev)

24 Comments

_kidlike

2 minutes ago

can we choose read-after-write consistency at query time, if needed?

Atreiden

3 hours ago

The top concern I've gotten from dev teams when proposing HA distributed postgres (e.g through RDS Aurora global) is that eventual consistency is not suitable for many workloads.

Does Neki solve for this, and if so how? My understanding of CAP theorem is that this basically requires some compromises around availability, but I'm curious as to what that looks like in practice here.

mcpherrinm

3 hours ago

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)

arrowleaf

2 hours ago

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?

erulabs

4 hours ago

I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well.

Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!

imjosh-dev

3 hours ago

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.

vira28

3 hours ago

Obviously welcome more tools for Postgres and sharding but it’s a tough hill to climb against the hyper clouds. Best wishes to the team.

tedd4u

42 minutes ago

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.

samlambert

2 hours ago

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.

vaibhav2614

4 hours ago

Pretty exciting to see a sharded Postgres product in the market.

The pitch is compelling. I wonder how many teams will be able to operate sharded database setups in production as a result of this.

Hasz

3 hours ago

Independent of the product, love the branding design for this page.

ragall

4 hours ago

I see no mention of foreign keys, or any other constraints, across shards. If, as I suspect, they're not implemented, it would still be useful but at the level of Spanner 10 years ago.

aabhay

4 hours ago

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

spongeboi

4 hours ago

Cross shard transactions are supported, but we don't have support for atomic 2pc cross shard transactions, its WIP

ragall

32 minutes ago

Are you one of the developers ? If so, you need to add a specific page explaining in detail the guarantees that this gives.

For example: point 08 says "Assign different tables or workloads to different shard groups" and point 02 says "Split hot shards as workloads grow". How do those interact ? Can a single table be split across multiple shards ? If so don't you need 2pc to enforce primary key constraints ?

The intro pages just read as AI slop.

xyst

2 hours ago

only planet scale? Rookie numbers.

I am looking for interdimensional and interuniversal scale. Which of you trust fund babies has a startup which is working on this problem?