News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases by saxenaabhi on Thursday October 30, 2025 @04:20PM (#45764853)
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.

My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.

[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...

[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata

Re:PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases by samlambert on Thursday October 30, 2025 @05:07PM (#45765364)
It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.
Re:PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases by saxenaabhi on Thursday October 30, 2025 @05:20PM (#45765517)
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?

Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.

Re:PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases by samlambert on Thursday October 30, 2025 @05:24PM (#45765561)
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
Re:PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases by marcoglauser on Friday October 31, 2025 @12:18AM (#45768389)
I'm honestly confused why local nvme disks haven't become the standard for cloud offerings a long time ago.

Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)

Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.