November 2022 Summaries

PlanetScale is a cloud-based platform that provides a simple and cost-effective way to create a performant MySQL configuration, replacing traditional database management tasks such as setting up clusters, configuring storage, and managing networking gear. The platform uses Vitess for each and every database hosted on it, providing an environment that automatically configures compute, storage, and networking, as well as handles failovers and load balancing. PlanetScale also offers features such as online schema changes with automatic branching and deployment, data caching with Boost, monitoring and metrics with Insights, backup and restore capabilities, and more, all built into the platform to simplify database management without additional overhead.

PlanetScale has announced that its single-tenant customers can now request Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with the company, as part of its efforts to support customers in various industries and meet HIPAA requirements. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a federal law that sets standards for protecting sensitive patient health information, and PlanetScale has worked to ensure its security and privacy measures meet these requirements. PlanetScale can now provide Business Associate Agreements with customers deployed in the single-tenant environment, as part of its commitment to supporting customer needs across various industries.

PlanetScale Boost is a state-of-the-art partial materialization engine that improves the performance and throughput of SQL queries by up to 1,000×. It runs alongside a PlanetScale database and uses a caching architecture that is more performant than a cache and more efficient than a materialized view. When a query is executed, it plans how to process the data on writes instead of reads, making writes hard and reads simple. The system keeps intermediate state to maintain partial views efficiently, which helps resolve misses by querying into it. PlanetScale Boost can also run in reverse, allowing it to query into its own state for optimal performance. Its performance is O(1) on average, with a focus on reliability and consistency with the underlying database. A limited beta of PlanetScale Boost is now available, and users can sign up for more information.

PlanetScale has launched a new product called PlanetScale Boost, which aims to make application queries up to 1,000 times faster with just a few clicks. Building responsive software often requires caching logic to hide SQL query latency, but PlanetScale Boost eliminates this need by making the chosen queries faster without additional logic or infrastructure. The product uses Insights to find slow query patterns and deploys infrastructure in about a minute that keeps the cache up-to-date in real-time. PlanetScale Boost is now available in a limited beta for a select group, with more information to be shared through engineering blog posts and a demo video. The goal of this product is to make caching code maintenance obsolete by making databases fast enough on their own.

A serverless computing architecture allows individual components of a stack to be designed and horizontally scaled, allocating more computing resources on the fly as needed. However, databases pose a challenge with connection limits, forcing developers to use proxies like pgbouncer to handle small workloads. MySQL's memory allocation is critical for isolation guarantees, but raising its max_connections variable can lead to dangerous crashes and downtime. Connection pooling, such as that offered by Vitess and PlanetScale, safeguards and optimizes database management, while also scaling alongside the cluster. By using a combination of connection pooling and the PlanetScale Global Routing Infrastructure, developers can maintain nearly limitless connections, even with large-scale applications like those running one million active MySQL connections. This architecture enables horizontal scaling beyond arbitrary limits, making it suitable for serverless function workloads.