Run Your Applications Worldwide Without Worrying About The Database With Planetscale

Summary

One of the most critical aspects of software projects is managing its data. Managing the operational concerns for your database can be complex and expensive, especially if you need to scale to large volumes of data, high traffic, or geographically distributed usage. Planetscale is a serverless option for your MySQL workloads that lets you focus on your applications without having to worry about managing the database or fight with differences between development and production. In this episode Nick van Wiggeren explains how the Planetscale platform is implemented, their strategies for balancing maintenance and improvements of the underlying Vitess project with their business goals, and how you can start using it today to free up the time you spend on database administration.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold.
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• Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nick van Wiggeren about Planetscale, a serverless and globally distributed MySQL database as a service

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what Planetscale is and the story behind it?
• What are the core problems that you are solving with the Planetscale platform?
  • How might an engineering team address those challenges in the absence of Planetscale/Vitess?
• Can you describe how Planetscale is implemented?
  • What are some of the addons that you have had to build on top of Vitess to make Planetscale
• What are the impacts that a serverless database has on the way teams approach their application/platform design and development?
• metrics exposed to help users optimize their usage
• What is your policy/philosophy for determining what capabilities to include in Vitess and what belongs in the Planetscale platform?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Planetscale/Vitess used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Planetscale?
• When is Planetscale the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Planetscale?

Contact Info

• @nickvanwig on Twitter
• LinkedIn
• nickvanw on GitHub

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
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Links

• Planetscale
• Vitess
• CNCF == Cloud Native Computing Foundation
• Hadoop
• OLTP == Online Transactional Processing
• Galera
• Yugabyte DB
  • Podcast Episode
• CitusDB
• MariaDB SkySQL
  • Podcast Episode
• CockroachDB
  • Podcast Episode
• NewSQL
• AWS PrivateLink
• Planetscale Connect
• Segment
  • Podcast Episode
• BigQuery

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA