Blog
By Richard Crowley |
On 2025-10-20, there was an incident that affected PlanetScale, initially caused by DNS misconfiguration in one of PlanetScale’s service providers, followed by several hours of capacity constraints and network instability. →
By Ben Dicken |
Postgres 18 brings a significant improvement to read performance via async I/O and I/O worker threads. Here we compare its performance to Postgres 17. →
By Vicent Martí |
A new hybrid design for scalable vector indexes and a reference implementation in MySQL →
By Ben Dicken |
Processes and threads are fundamental abstrations for operating systems. Learn how they work and how they impact database performance in this interactive article. →
By Sam Lambert |
Why a lagging client can stall or break failover, and how MySQL’s GTID model avoids it. →
By Ben Dicken |
Every time you use a computer, the cache is working to ensure your experience is fast. →
By Ben Dicken |
Benchmarking Postgres in a transparent, standardized and fair way is challenging. Here, we look at the process of how we did it in-depth →
By Vicent Martí |
A novel technique for implementing dynamic language interpreters in Go, applied to the Vitess SQL evaluation engine →
By Ben Dicken |
Take an interactive journey through the history of IO devices, and learn how IO device latency affects performance. →
By Shlomi Noach |
Design considerations for implementing a database throttler with a comparison of singular vs distributed throttler deployments. →
By Ben Dicken |
B-trees are used by many modern DBMSs. Learn how they work, how databases use them, and how your choice of primary key can affect index performance. →
By Ben Dicken |
For big databases, IOPS and throughput can become a bottleneck in database performance. Learn how sharding helps scale out IOPS and throughput beyond the limitations of a single server. →
By Ben Dicken |
Sharding a database comes with many benefits: Scalability, failure isolation, write throughput, and more. However, one of the lesser-known benefits comes from improved backups and restore performance. →
By Shlomi Noach |
Learn about the options for running non-blocking schema changes natively to MySQL, using Vitess, or other tools →
By Ben Dicken |
Large databases often have a small number of very large tables that makes scaling difficult. How can you scale with these while keeping your database performant? This article covers three techniques. →
By Holly Guevara |
Learn about the different types of sharding: directory-based, range-based, and hash-based plus some of the pros and cons of each. →
By Ben Dicken |
The adaptive hash index helps to improve performance of the already-fast B-tree lookups →