August 2021 Summaries

When database issues arise, tracking queries on a running system is a challenging task. Existing solutions can cause additional system load or only capture a small subset of queries. To address this, PlanetScale now tracks query statistics without any overhead using Vitess to monitor how many times a query runs, rows it returns, and its completion time. This provides a complete view of query traffic on the database, enabling developers to debug queries and make changes to their application or deploy new indexes with non-blocking schema changes. By flagging long-running queries, PlanetScale aims to optimize performance and improve user experience. The company has also optimized a slow query by analyzing query statistics and MySQL explain plans, reducing its execution time from 719ms to under 20ms.

The focus of database products is shifting from infrastructure to developer experience, with a growing emphasis on providing superior user interfaces, scalability, and flexibility. As databases mature, they are becoming more commoditized, and what matters most will be how well they support the needs of developers. The key aspects of developer experience in databases include interacting with data, ad-hoc queries, authentication and user management, workflows for migrations, version control, pricing, scaling, and monitoring. With advancements in technology, it is expected that databases will follow a similar path to general compute, where what's happening under the hood becomes less important than the overall developer experience.

We shipped a PlanetScale changelog, which often serves as the primary source of announcements about new features and upgrades. The changelog now includes an Admin Audit Log that tracks user actions, providing transparency and security for databases. Additionally, PlanetScale has achieved SOC 2 type II Compliance to ensure the continuous security and integrity of data stored on their platform. The changelog also boasts a visually appealing design, while users can stay updated with new feature ships by signing up for an email notification.

Never accidentally reapply a past migration again! We’ve removed another barrier to using PlanetScale branches with the framework or migration tool of your choice. Now, you can automatically persist schema changes in your migration table across database branches. Many frameworks and migration tools keep track of database schema changes in a migration table that includes data about what migrations have been applied and in what order. With this feature, you can now turn on the ability to automatically copy migration data from these tables any time you open a deploy request or make a new database branch. You can specify the name of your framework or migration tools’ migration table name. This feature fits into your existing workflow by allowing you to see how it works with Prisma in a TypeScript application. Many frameworks and migration tools will use a similar workflow, so give this feature a try!

PlanetScale is building the best database for developers and uses its own service as its primary database. The company has high standards for development velocity and wants to empower developers with features like branching and non-blocking schema changes to constantly ship new features to users. PlanetScale's engineers use a Ruby on Rails API and Next.js front-end, and leverage the `branching` feature to deploy changes to their production database. The company uses `non-blocking schema changes` to decouple deployment from application deployments, allowing for zero downtime and no locking of production database tables. This process empowers developers and makes database migrations less scary. PlanetScale is hiring for its team that builds the best database for developers.

PlanetScale users can now generate connection strings to connect their databases using popular frameworks and languages, enabling secure connections to other serverless computing platforms like AWS Lambda or Vercel. Connection strings are built with security as a priority, storing hashes and metadata about database passwords instead of plain text. This feature also includes native MySQL authentication support and GitHub Secret Scanning out of the box to prevent leaked secrets. With this update, PlanetScale can handle tens of thousands of simultaneous database connections, scaling with serverless applications.