PlanetScale today took the wraps off its new database as a service based on Vitess, the horizontally distributed branch of MySQL that was developed at

PlanetScale Unveils Distributed MySQL Database Service Based on Vitess

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2021-05-21 16:00:07

PlanetScale today took the wraps off its new database as a service based on Vitess, the horizontally distributed branch of MySQL that was developed at YouTube. Folks who have struggled with eventual consistency and schemas-less nature of NoSQL databases are among the potential recruits that PlanetScale Chief Product Officer Sam Lambert is targeting with the database service.

Vitess is a horizontal database clustering system for MySQL that was created by YouTube back in 2010 to track data associated with videos, such as the number of views for given video, and other pieces of metadata. By design, MySQL runs on a single server, but demand for the Google subsidiary’s videos was exceeding the capability of what a single scale-up server could provide, so the company engineered a way to shard MySQL data across multiple servers in a cluster.

Over time, other large web-scale companies adopted Vitess, including Slack and GitHub. Deployments grew, including one that reached 70,000 nodes in a cluster, according to Lambert. In 2018, the original co-creators of Vitess, Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, co-founded PlanetScale with the goal of building a company around the open source Vitess project. The same year, Vitess was accepted as an incubation project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

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