Sam Lambert returns to The Changelog after four years to discuss PlanetScale's new Postgres offering, the Neki proxy rewrite, and how database operations are evolving. He shares the reasoning behind PlanetScale's 'do-over' of Vitess for Postgres, the role of AI agents in schema management, and the company's capability to roll back enormous tables instantly. The conversation also touches on the open-source dilemma and Lambert's critique of the major cloud providers as lazy monopolies.
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Novel
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$5 PlanetScale Postgres
PlanetScale launched a new Postgres-compatible serverless database starting at $5, bringing its branching and developer workflow to the Postgres ecosystem.
Neki is PlanetScale's from-scratch rewrite of the Vitess proxy, designed specifically for Postgres after discovering that the MySQL‑oriented Vitess couldn't simply be adapted.
PlanetScale demonstrated the ability to roll back a table as large as 500 terabytes in seconds, defying conventional expectations for big data operations.
Lambert argued that the major cloud providers — AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure — have become complacent monopolies that stifle innovation and should be broken up.