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Vitess-based MySQL replacement

21 posts · Apr 2020 – Nov 2025

What this trail covers

PlanetScale offers a managed Vitess service, abstracting the complexities of self-hosting Vitess. This includes handling the significant time, resources, and expertise required for implementation, migration, operational processes (provisioning, service discovery, backup/restore, topology management), application integration, and ongoing maintenance. The managed service aims to simplify the use, operation, and maintenance of Vitess and MySQL at scale, providing features like database branching and sharding. This post details how sharding MySQL databases can lead to minimized impact from failures, more efficient maintenance tasks, and potential cost savings through horizontal scaling and utilization of commodity disks.

All PlanetScale trails
  1. Announcing Vitess 23This post announces Vitess 23.0.0, detailing its new defaults (MySQL 8.4), improved metrics (e.g., `TransactionsProcessed`, `SkippedRecoveries`), and operational enhancements (VTOrc, topology controls). It highlights the removal of deprecated metrics and API endpoints, and updates to VTTablet and CLI/Docker configurations. Specific upgrade instructions for operator users migrating from MySQL 8.0 to 8.4 are provided, emphasizing the need for `innodb_fast_shutdown=0` during the transition.
  2. Self-managed Vitess vs Managed Vitess with PlanetScaleThis post details the significant engineering effort and resources required for self-hosting Vitess, contrasting it with the benefits of PlanetScale's managed Vitess service. It highlights the time investment (e.g., Slack's 3-year migration), the need for extensive prep work (MySQL compatibility), operational process development (provisioning, discovery, backup, topology), application integration, and the challenges of migration and ongoing maintenance (e.g., Square's deadlocks, scatter queries, ACID transactions, resharding). It emphasizes that PlanetScale, as a major contributor to Vitess, simplifies these complexities for users.
  3. Three surprising benefits of sharding a MySQL databaseThis post details three benefits of sharding a MySQL database beyond increased throughput: minimized impact of failures by isolating them to specific shards, more efficient maintenance tasks like backups and schema migrations due to parallelization across smaller datasets, and potential cost savings by enabling linear scaling with commodity hardware and avoiding over-provisioning for peak loads.
  4. Horizontal sharding for MySQL made easyThis post explains the concept of horizontal sharding for MySQL databases as a solution to scale limitations beyond monolithic databases. It contrasts vertical and horizontal scaling, discusses the cost of overprovisioning, and highlights the challenges of implementing sharding at the application layer, citing examples from Pinterest and Etsy. The post then introduces Vitess as an open-source solution that handles sharding logic externally, providing operational benefits. Finally, it positions PlanetScale as a managed platform that democratizes Vitess's capabilities, offering horizontal sharding, online schema migrations, and other features with reduced complexity and risk.
  5. All of the tech PlanetScale Vitess replacesThis post details the various components and infrastructure that PlanetScale's Vitess-based offering replaces compared to managing a traditional MySQL environment. It covers replacing the need for manual setup of MySQL clusters, storage solutions, networking gear, and orchestration tools. It also highlights the replacement of external tools like gh-ost and pt-online-schema-change with PlanetScale's branching and deploy request workflow for online schema changes, and the replacement of third-party monitoring tools like SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor with PlanetScale Insights. Finally, it contrasts PlanetScale's automatic backup and restore functionality with manual configuration requirements.
  7. What is Vitess: resiliency, scalability, and performanceThis post introduces Vitess as an open-source database clustering system for MySQL, explaining its role in enabling resiliency, scalability, and performance. It details how Vitess uses multiple MySQL instances and a proxy (VTGate) for intelligent query routing and automatic failover. It also describes horizontal sharding for scaling and how VTGate and VTTablet manage connections to optimize performance.
  8. Introduction to MySQL joinsThis post provides a detailed tutorial on using different types of JOIN clauses in MySQL (INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and simulating FULL OUTER JOINs) with concrete examples and explanations of their behavior and use cases. It covers creating sample tables, demonstrating cross joins, aliasing columns, and filtering for unrelated data.
  9. Indexing JSON in MySQLThis post introduces methods for indexing JSON data in MySQL. It details using generated columns (available in MySQL 5.7+) and functional indexes (available in MySQL 8.0.13+) to indirectly index parts of JSON documents. The post explains the syntax for creating these indexes, demonstrates how MySQL's optimizer can leverage them even when querying the JSON expression directly, and highlights the need for casting when using functional indexes to avoid data type issues.
  10. Declarative MySQL schemas with Atlas CLIThis post introduces Atlas CLI as a tool for managing MySQL database schemas declaratively. It demonstrates how to set up a PlanetScale database, generate an HCL schema definition file from an existing database using `atlas schema inspect`, modify the schema definition, and apply changes to the database using `atlas schema apply`. It highlights the benefits of treating database schemas as code for versioning and automation within CI/CD pipelines.
  11. Build a multi-stage pipeline with PlanetScale and AWSThis post details the integration of PlanetScale's branching and deployment workflow with AWS services (CodeBuild, ECR, Lightsail) to create a multi-stage CI/CD pipeline for a Go API. It outlines the steps for setting up GitHub triggers, building Docker images, deploying to different environments (QA and Production), and crucially, using the PlanetScale CLI to sync database schema changes between development and production branches as part of the production deployment process.
  12. One million queries per second with MySQLThis post demonstrates PlanetScale's ability to achieve over one million queries per second using a Vitess-based MySQL cluster. It details benchmarking with a TPC-C sysbench workload, showing how horizontal sharding (doubling shards from 16 to 32 and then to 40) directly correlates with increased throughput (QPS). The post also illustrates diminishing returns and increased latency as individual shards reach their resource limits, highlighting the need for more shards to scale throughput. It confirms that 40 shards achieved the target of over 1M QPS.
  13. How PlanetScale prevents MySQL downtimeThis post details how PlanetScale mitigates database downtime by leveraging Vitess for system maturity and scalability, deploy request warnings and rollback capabilities for human error, and PlanetScale Insights for application issues. It emphasizes the importance of a robust underlying system like Vitess and proactive monitoring tools to prevent outages.
  14. How to Prevent SQL Injection Attacks in Node.jsThis post details how to prevent SQL injection attacks in Node.js applications using the `mysql2` npm package. It explains the nature of SQL injection attacks with examples, demonstrates how to configure the `mysql2` client, and provides three primary methods for prevention: disabling multiple statements, using placeholders (parameterized queries), and input validation (including allowlisting). The post emphasizes that placeholders are the most crucial defense.
  15. Build a Laravel application with a MySQL databaseThis post details how to build a Laravel application with a PlanetScale MySQL database. It covers setting up a PlanetScale database, creating branches for development and production, connecting the Laravel application using credentials, defining database schema with migrations, and populating the database with seeders and factories. It specifically demonstrates the use of PlanetScale's branching and deploy request workflow for managing schema changes and highlights the integration with Laravel's ORM (Eloquent) and migration system.
  16. Bring your data to PlanetScaleThis post details the zero-downtime data migration process from existing MySQL databases to PlanetScale. It explains how Vitess's Unmanaged Tablet technology is used for the initial online data copy, followed by binary log replication to keep the PlanetScale database in sync. The post outlines the steps for connecting the application to PlanetScale as a replica, routing reads and writes through it for validation, and finally promoting PlanetScale as the primary database. It also describes the process of detaching the external database once the migration is complete.
  17. Comparing AWS’s RDS and PlanetScaleThis post details the advantages of PlanetScale over AWS RDS, focusing on scalability and developer workflows. It highlights Vitess's ability to handle nearly limitless connections and its query consolidation feature. It also contrasts PlanetScale's non-blocking schema changes and database branching for CI/CD with the complexities and downtime often associated with RDS. The post emphasizes PlanetScale's developer-first design and ease of use compared to RDS.
  18. NoneSQL All the DevExThis post argues that future database differentiation will come from superior developer experience (DevEx) rather than just infrastructure improvements. It contrasts the evolution of databases through infrastructure-focused eras (relational, NoSQL, SQL scalers like Vitess) with the emerging importance of DevEx. The author defines DevEx in databases across three categories: interacting with data (application queries, ad-hoc queries, auth/user management), workflows (migrations, version control, environments), and data branching. The post positions PlanetScale's Vitess-based approach as a leader in this DevEx shift.
  19. PlanetScale on VitessThis post introduces PlanetScale's foundational choice of Vitess as the engine powering its managed database service. It explains Vitess's origins at YouTube for massive scalability and its benefits over vanilla MySQL, such as enterprise-grade scalability, automated failure detection and recovery, automatic row limits, hot row protection, query consolidation, and non-blocking schema changes. The post also touches on Vitess's sharding capabilities and the operational complexities PlanetScale aims to abstract away for developers, emphasizing ease of adoption and use through features like database branching and deploy requests.
  20. Announcing Vitess 9.0Vitess 9.0 introduces enhanced logging and metrics for VReplication debugging, completes VReplication support for JSON columns, and offers a v2 CLI for VReplication workflows. Online schema changes are streamlined with a finalized syntax using the @@ddl_strategy session variable, better auditing, managed retries, support for CREATE/DROP statements, and safe, lazy DROPs converted to RENAME statements. New user guides for VSchema and production deployment are also provided.
  21. Announcing Vitess 8.0Vitess 8.0 release notes detailing major themes: improved compatibility with MySQL (SET, information_schema) and frameworks (PHP, JS, Python, Ruby, Java, Rust, tooling), enhanced VReplication with better metrics/logging/API for CDC, usability improvements, and innovation through VTorc integration (experimental) and online schema change support (pt-online-schema-change, gh-ost).
  22. Learn Horizontal Scaling on PlanetScaleDB with Vitess — Rate Puppies in a Rust app with Sharded MySQL DatabaseThis post explains the core concepts of Vitess sharding, including VSchema, Vindex, and Vitess Sequences, using a practical example of a dog rating application. It details how VSchema defines data organization across shards, how Vindexes map rows to shards, and how Vitess Sequences generate unique, monotonically increasing IDs across shards. The post also provides example schemas and VSchemas for both sharded and lookup keyspaces.
  23. Announcing Vitess 7Vitess 7 introduces major themes of improved SQL support (replica transactions, savepoints, session system variables), stability (rewrites of VTGate healthcheck, VTTablet tabletserver/manager), and innovation (VStream Copy for CDC, Schema Versioning, VExec/Workflow commands, dedicated connection framework). It also adds three new tutorials for vitess-operator, region-based sharding, and Docker installation.
  24. Announcing Vitess 6Vitess 6 introduces improved SQL support by incorporating common application queries into its test suite, fixing issues with SHOW commands and SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. It defaults to using Kubernetes as the Topology Service via Helm charts, simplifying installation and supporting Helm 3. VReplication workflows (MoveTables, Resharding) are now generally available, replacing older migration methods. The test suite has been fully migrated to Go, and legacy code related to Statement-Based Replication and V2 query routing has been removed.