PlanetScale

PlanetScale provides managed MySQL and Postgres databases for developers building and scaling applications. Its MySQL service uses Vitess to distribute data across shards while presenting a unified database to applications. PlanetScale handles the operational work around that infrastructure, including provisioning and failure recovery. Its database branching and Deploy Requests let developers prepare schema changes separately, check for conflicts and apply them without blocking the running database.

Founded in 2018 by co-creators and maintainers of Vitess, PlanetScale grew from a hosted Vitess platform into a developer-focused MySQL service in 2021, later adding Postgres. Its Neki product extends that scaling approach to Postgres: a router distributes queries across machines and combines their results, with ordinary Postgres running on each shard. Applications connect through the standard Postgres protocol, retaining their existing drivers and ORMs. Teams choose how tables are distributed through a JSON topology, and resharding runs as an online workflow. Neki entered platform preview in September 2026, with production use explicitly excluded during that preview.

For applications mixing human activity with automated workloads, Database Traffic Control gives PlanetScale Postgres users resource budgets for different query groups. Teams can identify traffic by application, database user or custom tags, then limit CPU usage and concurrency so agent traffic does not consume the resources needed by interactive features. The system uses query-performance measurements to calibrate Postgres planner estimates and can block over-budget queries before execution. This addresses both individual expensive queries and bursts whose cumulative cost would overload the database.