With the launch of PlanetScale, we are excited to share more about the non-blocking schema change workflow we’ve built for our platform. We love dev

Non-Blocking Schema Changes

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2021-05-20 21:00:04

With the launch of PlanetScale, we are excited to share more about the non-blocking schema change workflow we’ve built for our platform.

We love developers. We obsess over how to make them more productive with their database. In every conversation with our customers, we’ve heard that schema changes are one of the biggest pain points when it comes to using a relational database. We’ve heard about schema change processes that require opening tickets to get a DBA review for each change. This can take weeks.

At some companies, engineering teams won’t change or update certain columns in their production databases because the migration will take too long and will cause performance issues. Others have told us about how they turned columns in their relational databases into JSON stores, just to avoid schema migrations.

While other technologies have grown more and more developer friendly, databases remain difficult to use, in part because of the challenges schema changes present.