Dub case study

PlanetScale gives Dub a rock-solid foundation and unmatched development velocity.

Dub.co is the open-source link management infrastructure for modern marketing teams. With Dub, organizations are empowered to take control of their link and click-tracking data and are given a powerful analytics platform to gain insights about their audience. Dub was built on top of PlanetScale from day one, has never once had an issue with uptime, and leverages many of PlanetScale's features to make working with their database seamless and accelerate their development velocity.

A fast-moving company requires a powerful database platform

Steven Tey is the founder of Dub, a product that is build on top of a PlanetScale database. Dub provides a link management platform for thousands of organizations, empowering them with the ability to track pageviews with detailed analytics.

Their small but nimble engineering team builds Dub with high development velocity, and is constantly making innovative improvements to their platform in order to deliver an excellent experience to their users. This also means they need a database that can move as quickly as they do. With PlanetScale, they have found the perfect database platform to serve as the foundation of their infrastructure.

Startup to large scale with PlanetScale

PlanetScale was the database of choice from Dub's inception. In an interview with Steven, he describes why building on top of PlanetScale was desirable.

"PlanetScale's Vitess offering was very appealing to use because of the scale that we anticipated for Dub... We currently manage 40k new links every month... We're expected to hit about 100 million clicks a month in the next 12 months."

Vitess facilitates zero downtime with its capabilities of managing replicas and handling automatic failover. It also allows both vertical and horizontal sharding. It is used by some of the web's largest companies — Slack, Etsy, HubSpot, GitHub, and more — to scale their MySQL instances. Since Dub has started with Vitess from the beginning, they are already set up to scale as far as they need to as their customer base grows.

"The performance and uptime with PlanetScale has honestly been sublime. We have never had to worry about that...It's been incredibly reliable from day 1 and we cannot recommend it more."

A positive developer experience

Every PlanetScale database is built on top of two proven open-source technologies: MySQL and Vitess. However, PlanetScale has built several features on top of this to make working with these databases simple. These include branching and deploy requests, Insights, and backups - all of which Dub leverages.

"For us, the most utilized feature is definitely deploy requests because that basically allows us to iterate really quickly without having to worry about breaking production."

Steven also talked about how automated backups and the ability to easily restore from a backup has had a big impact. Not only does it provide peace-of-mind for the sake of data durability, but it has also been used to help a customer in need.

"Backups has actually been a lifesaver for us. We had a customer accidentally delete thousands of links from their workspace and while we currently don't have soft deletes, we were able to go back into PlanetScale and restore their links."

PlanetScale validates every backup it takes, so you always know the backup will restore correctly and quickly if you ever need to use it. All of the features PlanetScale has built into the product have facilitated these positive experiences for Dub's development team and for their customers.

Documentation and support

Steven and his team leverage PlanetScale's high-quality documentation, support staff, and schema recommendations to keep their database running efficiently. When they have questions about how to use their database, they first turn to the docs, which usually provide all they need to answer their questions. When human intervention is required, they turn to our support team, who always have helpful answers to their questions.

"Support has been very helpful when it comes to giving advice and educating us on how to use indexes"

Overall, the team at Dub has been extremely satisfied with all of their interactions with PlanetScale's products and support team.