PlanetScale Unveils Sharded Postgres Solution, Built From First Principles

San Francisco, CA – PlanetScale, a leading database-as-a-service provider, has announced the private preview of its new sharded PostgreSQL product, "PlanetScale for Postgres." The company confirmed that this new offering is developed "from first principles" and is not a fork of Vitess, despite PlanetScale's deep expertise with the MySQL-based sharding solution.

In a recent tweet, PlanetScale stated, > "We're building our sharded Postgres product from first principles. It is not a fork of Vitess. Instead, we're applying our learnings from the past 6 years of building, maintaining, and running Vitess at scale to create the best solution for large-scale Postgres workloads." This initiative marks a significant expansion for PlanetScale, historically known for its Vitess-powered MySQL sharding.

The move into the PostgreSQL ecosystem is driven by substantial customer demand, according to Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. The company observed an "immense number of companies" requesting PostgreSQL support following their PlanetScale Metal announcement. Lambert noted that extensive discussions with over 50 current PostgreSQL hosting platform customers revealed common issues such as "regular outages, poor performance, and high cost."

PlanetScale aims to address these challenges by leveraging its engineering prowess and experience in building scalable database infrastructure. The company asserts that "PlanetScale for Postgres" consistently outperforms existing PostgreSQL products, including Amazon Aurora and AlloyDB, even when competitors are allocated double the resources. This performance is attributed to running real PostgreSQL on a proprietary operator and utilizing locally-attached NVMe SSD drives.

The decision to build from first principles rather than adapting Vitess for PostgreSQL stems from the fundamental differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Vitess was specifically engineered to leverage MySQL's strengths, and PlanetScale recognized that a truly optimized sharding solution for PostgreSQL required a fresh architectural approach. This strategic pivot positions PlanetScale in a competitive landscape that includes other efforts to bring Vitess-like scaling to PostgreSQL, such as Supabase's "Multigres" initiative.