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PlanetScale · Engineering blog · 9.1 a month · 41 posts since Jun 25, 2026

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Nov 5

Designing a reliable unplanned failover

How Neki detects a failed Postgres primary, and chooses a new one from the WAL that survived.

Databases

Nov 3

The hidden latency inside your database

Network-attached storage is a fine choice and a bad default.

Databases

Oct 29

Designing a planned switchover for minimum disruption

How Neki uses preflight checks, query buffering, synchronous replication, and fast rollback to make Postgres primary switchovers less disruptive.

Databases

Oct 27

What was the turning point for Postgres?

Postgres is the most popular database choice among developers. Postgres is the default choice for agents, powering countless applications where those new to app building don't even know what a database is.

Databases

Oct 23

Shard design doesn't start from your tables

Shard group design starts from your queries, not your tables. Find the key that your most important queries and transactions share, and put every table that carries that key in one group.

Databases

Oct 21

I don't trust ON DELETE CASCADE

A one-line convenience in your database schema can become an outage. There are better ways to delete data that won't risk locking up your database.

Databases

Oct 20

Neki update: $50 Metal, read-only replicas, Azure, and more

Postgres compatibility, read-only replicas, smaller Metal instances, Azure, and more have landed for Neki since platform preview.

Databases

Oct 14

Sequences and other volatiles in Neki

How Neki evaluates PostgreSQL volatile expressions with the right cardinality to preserve sequence semantics across shards.

Databases

Oct 13

PlanetScale is now available on Azure

PlanetScale Postgres and Neki databases can now be deployed on Microsoft Azure

Product and company

Oct 12

What gets TOASTed in Postgres

Postgres 19 switches TOAST compression from pglz to LZ4. LZ4 is faster, but it isn't always smaller, and some reads get slower with it.

Databases

Oct 8

TIN v1.0.6: 2-3x faster, with support for stemming

TIN v1.0.6 supports stemming in 18 languages and is 2-3x as fast as the GA version

Reliability and performance

Oct 7

What today's software owes to Bronze Age clocks

Admission controls in software determine what does or doesn't happen next, and the most common implementation has ancient roots.

Databases

Oct 6

Introducing Dedicated Read Replicas for Postgres

Use dedicated read replicas to isolate read-only workloads and distribute your data across data centers around the world.

Databases

Oct 1

Building a faster, lazier router for Postgres

How Neki only decodes the parts of a PostgreSQL result the router actually needs.

Reliability and performance

Sep 28

Handling hot shards

What makes a good sharding strategy today might not work so well tomorrow. What happens when you have one tenant hitting your database orders of magnitude more than any other?

Databases

Sep 25

When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64

ARM and x86 can give you different performance at the same vCPU count. Here's what differs, what to measure, and how to choose.

Databases

Sep 23

TIN Postgres search is faster, better, and cheaper

A good Postgres search demo was doing the rounds online. Let's see what happens when we upgrade it to TIN.

Databases

Sep 22

Anatomy of a (Postgres) search engine

How a full-text search engine works, and how it works in Postgres

Databases

Sep 21

Blocking cutovers to save replication slots

Postgres understands high-availability architecture, but its defaults assume you don't have replication slots. This can get you into trouble in a cutover event.

Databases

Sep 18