Database School

Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres. This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he’s joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge. Sugu’s Vitess videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yOjF7qhmyY&list=PLA9CMdLbfL5zHg3oapO0HvtPfVx6_iJy6 The big announcement: https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgres Database School: https://databaseschool.com Follow Sugu: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssougou LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sougou Follow Aaron: Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 1:38 - The birth of Vitess at YouTube 3:19 - The spreadsheet that started it all 6:17 - Intelligent query parsing and connection pooling 9:46 - Preventing outages with query limits 13:42 - Growing Vitess beyond a connection pooler 16:01 - Choosing Go for Vitess 20:00 - The life of a query in Vitess 23:12 - How sharding worked at YouTube 26:03 - Hiding the keyspace ID from applications 33:02 - How Vitess evolved to hide complexity 36:05 - Founding PlanetScale & maintaining Vitess solo 39:22 - Sabbatical, rediscovering empathy, and volunteering 42:08 - The itch to bring Vitess to Postgres 44:50 - Why Multigres focuses on compatibility and usability 49:00 - The Postgres codebase vs. MySQL codebase 52:06 - Joining Supabase & building the Multigres team 54:20 - Starting Multigres from scratch with lessons from Vitess 57:02 - MVP goals for Multigres 1:01:02 - Integration with Supabase & database branching 1:05:21 - Sugu’s dream for Multigres 1:09:05 - Small teams, hiring, and open positions 1:11:07 - Community response to Multigres announcement 1:12:31 - Where to find Sugu

In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal. We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe storage, and how Metal delivers game-changing speed for MySQL workloads. Links: * Database School: https://databaseschool.com * PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com * PlanetScale Metal: https://planetscale.com/blog/announcing-metal Follow Richard: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/rcrowley * Website: https://rcrowley.org Follow Aaron: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis * Website: https://aaronfrancis.com — find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro: What is PlanetScale Metal? 00:39 - Meet Richard Crowley 01:33 - What is Vitess and how does it work? 03:00 - Where PlanetScale fits into the picture 09:03 - Why EBS is the default and its trade-offs 13:03 - How PlanetScale handles durability without EBS 16:03 - The engineering work behind PlanetScale Metal 22:00 - Deep dive into backups, restores, and availability math 25:03 - How PlanetScale replaces instances safely 27:11 - Performance gains with Metal: Latency and IOPS explained 32:03 - Database workloads that truly benefit from Metal 39:10 - The myth of the infinite cloud 41:08 - How PlanetScale plans for capacity 43:02 - Multi-tenant vs. PlanetScale Managed 44:02 - Who should use Metal and when? 46:05 - Pricing trade-offs and when Metal becomes cheaper 48:27 - Scaling vertically vs. sharding 49:57 - What’s next for PlanetScale Metal? 53:32 - Where to learn more

Johannes Schickling, original founder of Prisma, joins me to talk about LiveStore, his ambitious local-first data layer designed to rethink how we build apps from the data layer up. We dive deep into event sourcing, syncing with SQLite, and why this approach might power the next generation of reactive apps. 🔗 Links Mentioned Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=yt LiveStore Website: https://livestore.dev Repo: https://github.com/livestorejs Discord: https://discord.gg/RbMcjUAPd7 Follow Johannes Twitter: https://www.x.com/schickling LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schickling Website: https://www.schickling.dev Podcast: https://www.localfirst.fm Follow Aaron Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis Website: https://aaronfrancis.com — find articles, podcasts, courses, and more Database School YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15 Audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm 🕒 Chapters 00:00 - Intro to Johannes 01:00 - From Prisma to LiveStore 03:00 - Discovering local-first through Riffle 05:00 - What is local-first and who is it for? 07:00 - Why local-first is gaining popularity 10:00 - The inspiration from apps like Linear 13:00 - Gaps in local-first tooling in 2020 16:00 - Social apps vs. user-centric apps 18:00 - Distributed systems and why they’re hard 21:00 - The value of embracing local-first 24:00 - What LiveStore is and what it’s not 26:00 - Event sourcing as the core of LiveStore 30:00 - Benefits of event sourcing for apps 33:00 - Schema changes and time travel via events 37:00 - Materializers and how they work 43:00 - Syncing data across clients and devices 48:00 - Sync servers and cross-tab communication 54:00 - Architecture choices and dev tooling 59:00 - State of the project and future vision 1:06:00 - How to get involved

Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins me to explain how Durable Objects and D1 work under the hood—and why Cloudflare’s approach to stateful serverless infrastructure is so unique. We get into V8 isolates, replication models, routing strategies, and even upcoming support for containers.  Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=podcast  Follow Josh:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajoshhoward  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshthoward  Follow Aaron:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis  Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15 Database school audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm  Chapters  00:00 - Intro  00:37 - What is a Durable Object?  01:43 - Cloudflare’s serverless model and V8 isolates  03:58 - Why stateful serverless matters  05:14 - Durable Objects vs Workers  06:22 - How routing to Durable Objects works  08:01 - What makes them "durable"?  08:51 - Tradeoffs of colocating compute and state  10:58 - Stateless Durable Objects  12:49 - Waking up from sleep and restoring state  16:15 - Durable Object storage: KV and SQLite APIs  18:49 - Relationship between D1, Workers KV, and DOs  20:34 - Performance of local storage writes  21:50 - Storage replication and output gating  24:15 - Lifecycle of a request through a Durable Object  26:46 - Replication strategy and long-term durability  31:25 - Placement logic and sharding strategy  36:35 - Use cases: agents, multiplayer games, chat apps  40:33 - Scaling Durable Objects  41:14 - Globally unique ID generation  43:22 - Named Durable Objects and coordination  46:07 - D1 vs Workers KV vs Durable Objects  47:50 - Outerbase acquisition and DX improvements  49:49 - Querying durable object storage  51:20 - Developer Week highlights and new features  52:44 - Read replicas and sticky sessions  53:49 - Containers and the future of routing  56:47 - Deployment regions and infrastructure expansion  57:43 - Hiring and how to connect with Josh

In this episode of Database School, I talk with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and longtime PostgreSQL hacker, to talk about 20+ years in the Postgres community, the architecture behind Neon, and the future of multi-threaded Postgres. From paternity leave patches to branching production databases, we cover a lot of ground in this deep-dive conversation.  Links:  Let's make postgres multi-threaded: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5b-ac0d801163f4%40iki.fi  Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284487  Follow Heikki:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikki-linnakangas-6b58bb203/  Website: https://neon.tech  Follow Aaron:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis  Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15 Database school audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm  00:00 - Introduction and Heikki's background  01:19 - How Heikki got into Postgres  03:17 - First major patch: two-phase commit  04:00 - Governance and decision-making in Postgres  07:00 - Committer consensus and decentralization  09:25 - Attracting new contributors  11:25 - Founding Neon with Nikita Shamgunov  13:01 - Why separation of compute and storage matters  15:00 - Write-ahead log and architectural insights  17:03 - Early days of building Neon  20:00 - Building the control plane and user-facing systems  21:28 - What "serverless Postgres" really means  23:39 - Reducing cold start time from 5s to 700ms  25:05 - Storage architecture and page servers  27:31 - Who uses sleepable databases  28:44 - Multi-tenancy and schema management  31:01 - Role in low-code/AI app generation  33:04 - Branching, time travel, and read replicas  36:56 - Real-time point-in-time query recovery  38:47 - Large customers and scaling in Neon  41:04 - Heikki’s favorite Neon feature: time travel  41:49 - Making Postgres multi-threaded  45:29 - Why it matters for connection scaling  50:50 - The next five years for Postgres and Neon  52:57 - Final thoughts and where to find Heikki