Features
PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible database that brings you scale, performance, reliability, and cost-efficiencies — without sacrificing developer experience.
Each PlanetScale feature was designed to solve problems that database, reliability, and product engineering teams commonly face during daily operations.
With built-in online schema changes, you never have to deal with downtime or manually configure solutions like gh-ost or pt-online-schema-change. Deep and actionable query analytics ensure you can quickly debug issues and surface queries that can be improved. These are just a couple examples of the features we have implemented to make PlanetScale the best end-to-end solution for database hosting, scaling, and management.
- Familiar workflows: Branch schema like you branch your code.
- No compromises: Unlimited scale and high database performance — you don’t have to choose.
- Read-only regions: Support globally distributed applications with read-only regions.
- Zero downtime imports: Get started in minutes. Keep your existing database running while we do the import.
Unlimited scale and improved database performance
PlanetScale Metal offers local NVMe drives that unlock unlimited IOPS and unbeatable performance. Keep sharding logic out of your application with PlanetScale's underlying Vitess architecture. With PlanetScale sharding, you can split up large tables across several MySQL instances, leading to better performance, faster maintenance tasks like backups, and improved performance.
Bring the DevOps workflow to the database
Deploy your schema to production with no locking or downtime with non-blocking schema changes. Roll back problematic schema changes instantly without data loss.
Branch your database like you branch your code
Say goodbye to staging environments. PlanetScale’s branching workflow gives your team additional safeguards when making schema changes. Create an isolated branch of your production schema, make your schema changes, get team approvals, and merge the schema into production with no downtime.
Streamline processes to ship faster
We give you the tools to design processes that work best for your teams. Programmatically manage your database with our API, set up custom GitHub Actions, and more.
- PlanetScale CLI: Manage your database from the command line
- API reference: Get started with the PlanetScale API
Query insights to debug and improve performance
Monitor and debug queries directly from the dashboard with Insights. Unlike similar products, Insights provides a detailed look into all active queries running against your database. This allows you to identify queries that are running too long, too often, returning too much data, not using indexes appropriately, producing errors, and more.
Integrate with your preferred tools
PlanetScale is an OLTP database, and is not always the best solution for OLAP workloads. You likely already have your own preferred tools for these jobs. We have integrated support for Airbyte, Fivetran, and more to ensure you're able to use the best tool for the job.
- PlanetScale Connect: Easily move data for OLAP
MySQL-native vector search and storage
With PlanetScale vector support, you can store your vector data alongside your application's relational MySQL data — eliminating the need for a separate, specialized vector database.
- Pre-filtering and post-filtering
- Full SQL syntax — including JOIN, WHERE, and subqueries
- ACID compliance
- SPANN-based algorithm for large-scale workloads
Auto-route replica traffic
All PlanetScale clusters are made up of, at minimum, one primary and two replicas in the same region spread across three availability zones. With Global Replica credentials, we seamlessly route traffic to the read-only region with the lowest latency, without dropping the connection.