May 2022 Summaries

You can now analyze and debug individual query performance during specified time frames without leaving your PlanetScale dashboard with the new Insights tool. This interactive graph maps query performance metrics such as rows read, rows written, query latency, and queries per second for quick debugging. The tool also provides a section that shows important metrics for all active queries running against the database over the past 24 hours, allowing users to zoom in on a shorter time frame by dragging their cursor. With Insights, users can quickly identify slow instances of queries, generate an EXPLAIN plan, and even open it up in the web console. The tool is available in different plans with varying retention periods, including free Hobby access for the previous 24 hours, Scaler and Teams access for the previous 7 days, and Enterprise customization. By using Insights, users can debug slow or costly queries more efficiently and effectively.

There are many reasons you may need to move and/or transform your application data: to improve database performance, consolidate data, provide access to other teams in your organization to safely query data, and other reasons specific to your use case. With PlanetScale Connect (now in Beta), you can easily perform ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) actions on your data to fulfill your application needs. With the PlanetScale Connect, you can integrate with existing ELT platforms to extract data from your PlanetScale database and safely load it into other destinations for analysis, transformation, and more. You'll be able to select your PlanetScale database as a source within Airbyte, choose from hundreds of connectors, perform transformations on your data before loading it into its final destination, giving you complete control over migrating, transforming, and uploading data with just a few clicks and configurations. Implementing an established ELT pipeline can improve how you maintain and query historical data, consolidate unnecessary data, enrich data with additional context, increase productivity, and ensure accuracy of your data. PlanetScale Connect addresses three key issues: schema discovery, initial data dump, and incremental data synchronization to function as a source for an ELT platform.

To reduce database read latency for globally distributed applications, PlanetScale Portals allow users to create read-only regions near their applications, enabling faster reads and better user experience worldwide. With a few clicks, developers can set up additional read-only regions without worrying about capacity planning or pricing structures, as PlanetScale handles these complexities. The connection to the new read-only region is established using a connection string, which can be set up in various application frameworks, including Ruby on Rails. Automatic role switching and reading one's own writes are also supported to protect users from stale data due to replication lag. Pricing for Portals is based on storage costs and row reads, with storage costs increasing linearly with the number of read-only regions added. PlanetScale Portals are available in beta today, allowing developers to try it out and provide feedback.

We have an insatiable appetite to create a platform that will become a crucial part of the world of software development, designed to match the speed of your innovation and the scale of your vision. Our features are built to put more power in your hands, and our team is dedicated to delivering the future database before anyone else. We are committed to leading the way for all other databases and expect our community to hold us to this commitment. Databases are lagging behind DevOps innovation, and we wrote these principles to illustrate the path forward to a more powerful and scalable database experience.

The relational database model has been around for over forty years, but it has not adapted as much for metadata changes at scale as other software systems have. Traditionally, developers would plan schema changes months ahead and take the system down for maintenance to apply those changes. However, with modern development practices that emphasize continuous deployment and accelerated release cycles, relational databases are struggling to keep up. The current landscape requires highly available services that can operate around the clock, but relational databases still pose an operational barrier to continuous deployment. To address this challenge, a new paradigm is proposed that prioritizes non-blocking, lightweight, asynchronous, scheduled, interruptible, trackable, failure-agnostic, revertible, redeployable, and declarative schema migrations. These principles aim to give developers the confidence to deploy with velocity while minimizing operational considerations.

The PlanetScale Design Studio team created an animated illustration to showcase the new schema revert feature in a database, using Framer Motion's React animation library to bring their concept to life. They initially considered a side-by-side table approach but evolved into a storytelling concept, illustrating what might happen if someone needed to revert a schema change in their day. The animation demonstrates the process of deploying and reverting a schema change, with various states showcasing the success and error messages that appear during this process. By utilizing Framer Motion's features such as useAnimation hook, start method, delay prop, and promise array, they were able to create a seamless and polished animation sequence. The final implementation involved refining the timing of the animation through manual review and adjustments, resulting in an engaging visual representation of the feature that provides a mental model for users to expect when using it.