{"slug": "vitess", "name": "Vitess", "category": "databases", "category_name": "Databases", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 12, "warners": 0, "score": 5.83, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2026-02-09", "latest": "2026-09-11", "why": "as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 6, "compare": 2, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "vitess.io", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://vitess.io", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Vitess"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794350192, "item_id": 49646887, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49646887", "by": "erulabs", "date": "2026-09-10", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale", "excerpt": "I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well. Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!", "context": "heavy Vitess/MySQL user", "use_case": "sharded MySQL", "switched_from": "", "story": "Neki \u2013 Sharded Postgres"}, {"id": 793062353, "item_id": 49566397, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566397", "by": "echohack5", "date": "2026-09-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Vitess/Neki, vector stores, spacetime are all really good things to be happening", "excerpt": "As someone who has been using alot of spacetime for side projects (like https://heat.echohack.app), I am continually impressed with the speed at which it operates. I think there's alot of interesting things happening in the database space. Vitess/Neki, vector stores, spacetime are all really good things to be happening. I think it's a shame that database developers seem to have a drama filled timeline out there. It's", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ok, but does it scale?"}, {"id": 782968928, "item_id": 48935558, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935558", "by": "bddicken", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Vitess and Neki both let you configure this via the VSchema", "excerpt": "A lot of what you're referring to is dictated by the sharding strategy. Vitess and Neki both let you configure this via the VSchema / data topology (That's what I'm getting at here) https://planetscale.com/blog/making-768-servers-look-like-1#how-does-it-know This decision matters a ton. I drilled into this specific point on sharding in one of my articles from awhile back: https://planetscale.com/blog/database-shardin", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 780141715, "item_id": 48758857, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48758857", "by": "khurs", "date": "2026-07-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "making Vitess for Postgresql", "excerpt": "and keep paying, and paying, and paying... forever. I worked for a startup who decided on AzureSQL, the costs means they were reluctant to have too many environments and ones of the same size, and the cpu/memory was below what they would have if they had self hosted a free database. Potgresql has chosen by many PAAS, SAAS and IAAS companies like Superbase, PlanetScale, Cloudflare and to meet there needs they are prod", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Database Traffic Control"}, {"id": 753462544, "item_id": 47091409, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091409", "by": "mattlord", "date": "2026-02-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would encourage you to look at the code and read the documentation", "excerpt": "It's open source. If you really want to know these things, I would encourage you to look at the code and read the documentation. As noted in the blog post, reverse vreplication is setup when you switch. You can switch back and forth and nothing is lost. https://github.com/vitessio/vitess https://vitess.io/docs/reference/vreplication/ \"isn't this just pushing the same issue forward in time?\" I don't understand what yo", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Zero downtime migrations at Petabyte scale"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "erulabs", "context": "heavy Vitess/MySQL user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49646887", "date": "2026-09-10"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["database sharding", "sharded mysql", "distributed transactions", "mysql sharding", "mysql sharding and migrations"], "compared": [{"slug": "postgresql", "name": "PostgreSQL", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "neki", "name": "Neki", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "mysql", "name": "MySQL", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "supabase", "name": "Supabase", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930075", "title": "Making 768 servers look like 1", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037781", "title": "Zero downtime migrations at Petabyte scale", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645686", "title": "Neki \u2013 Sharded Postgres", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949452", "title": "Another GitHub outage in the same day", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660555", "title": "118M Queries per Second on Neki", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563772", "title": "Ok, but does it scale?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"compare": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1, "compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 2}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 794609699, "item_id": 49663106, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49663106", "by": "samlambert", "date": "2026-09-11", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Not being rude, I just do not like the work of my company being written off and under appreciated with comments like yours. Saying it's an open source alternative when it is clearly not is incredibly disingenuous. Anyone can start a project and say it's an alternative until it achieves the same results is not an alternative. They have raised 10x more venture funding than my company, and we have out executed them with", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "118M Queries per Second on Neki"}, {"id": 794374256, "item_id": 49648391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648391", "by": "mcpherrinm", "date": "2026-09-10", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Vitess does have some options for atomic cross-shard commits", "excerpt": "Yeah. Vitess does have some options for atomic cross-shard commits using an additional database to track two-phase commits, but that's expensive so you probably want to avoid that. https://vitess.io/docs/25.0/reference/features/distributed-transaction/", "context": "", "use_case": "Database sharding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Neki \u2013 Sharded Postgres"}, {"id": 794350192, "item_id": 49646887, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49646887", "by": "erulabs", "date": "2026-09-10", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale", "excerpt": "I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well. Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!", "context": "heavy Vitess/MySQL user", "use_case": "sharded MySQL", "switched_from": "", "story": "Neki \u2013 Sharded Postgres"}, {"id": 793062353, "item_id": 49566397, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566397", "by": "echohack5", "date": "2026-09-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Vitess/Neki, vector stores, spacetime are all really good things to be happening", "excerpt": "As someone who has been using alot of spacetime for side projects (like https://heat.echohack.app), I am continually impressed with the speed at which it operates. I think there's alot of interesting things happening in the database space. Vitess/Neki, vector stores, spacetime are all really good things to be happening. I think it's a shame that database developers seem to have a drama filled timeline out there. It's", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ok, but does it scale?"}, {"id": 790063025, "item_id": 49378939, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378939", "by": "vindex10", "date": "2026-08-20", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL", "excerpt": "Came here to share a related fact :) This solution with WAL and compact resembled the database internals as taught by Martin Kleppmann. I asked Claude about this observation, and learned that the author (Vicent Mart\u00ed) wasn't only core Github developer but also worked on Vitess from PlanetScale. So no surprise these two contexts resulted in the design of Continuity as it is. https://vitess.io/ - Vitess is a database c", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Git at Any Scale"}, {"id": 782970784, "item_id": 48935674, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935674", "by": "bddicken", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Yep! https://vitess.io/docs/reference/features/distributed-transaction/", "excerpt": "Yep! https://vitess.io/docs/reference/features/distributed-transaction/", "context": "", "use_case": "distributed transactions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 782968928, "item_id": 48935558, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935558", "by": "bddicken", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Vitess and Neki both let you configure this via the VSchema", "excerpt": "A lot of what you're referring to is dictated by the sharding strategy. Vitess and Neki both let you configure this via the VSchema / data topology (That's what I'm getting at here) https://planetscale.com/blog/making-768-servers-look-like-1#how-does-it-know This decision matters a ton. I drilled into this specific point on sharding in one of my articles from awhile back: https://planetscale.com/blog/database-shardin", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 782964672, "item_id": 48935292, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935292", "by": "bddicken", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/migrating-etsyas-database-sharding-to-vitess", "excerpt": "Spreading requests out across hundreds, thousands, and in some cases even more is precisely what is done in the industry for big databases! Good examples: cashapp: https://code.cash.app/planetscale-metal github: https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-githubs-relational-databases-scale/ etsy: https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/migrating-etsyas-database-sharding-to-vitess These companies could not re", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 782934256, "item_id": 48933391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933391", "by": "jackb4040", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It looks like it does support transactions, but they basically destroy the performance benefits", "excerpt": "Thank you, good points. I'm just learning about this in real time. It looks like it does support transactions, but they basically destroy the performance benefits: https://vitess.io/docs/faq/sharding/advanced/can-i-use-vitess-to-do-cross-shard-joins-or/ The more I read the more I'm struggling to understand the benefit of a router like this that sits on top of a monolithic SQL, vs a truly distributed DB like cockroach", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 782923280, "item_id": 48932705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932705", "by": "jackb4040", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "Looks like it's not drop-in, you need to heavily modify your data and indexes structurally", "excerpt": "I had this question too, even their \"Database Scaling\" course doesn't get to it. https://vitess.io/docs/faq/sharding/advanced/ Looks like it's not drop-in, you need to heavily modify your data and indexes structurally to make sharding performant. Cross-shard joins are possible but need to be designed for explicitly (to be fair, indexes also need to be designed explicitly in regular SQL). IDK if a drop-in solution is ", "context": "", "use_case": "MySQL sharding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 780141715, "item_id": 48758857, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48758857", "by": "khurs", "date": "2026-07-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "making Vitess for Postgresql", "excerpt": "and keep paying, and paying, and paying... forever. I worked for a startup who decided on AzureSQL, the costs means they were reluctant to have too many environments and ones of the same size, and the cpu/memory was below what they would have if they had self hosted a free database. Potgresql has chosen by many PAAS, SAAS and IAAS companies like Superbase, PlanetScale, Cloudflare and to meet there needs they are prod", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Database Traffic Control"}, {"id": 775686000, "item_id": 48480375, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480375", "by": "gen220", "date": "2026-06-10", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "building an equivalent to Vitesse for Postgres", "excerpt": "Is there an explainer for people who are broadly familiar with the DB space? It sounds like you're building an equivalent to Vitesse for Postgres, but it's not super clear from the article (which I know is not the point of this, but still :) ). Edit: It also might be interesting to point out how your solution differs from what the folks at Planetscale are building https://planetscale.com/neki", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"}, {"id": 753462544, "item_id": 47091409, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091409", "by": "mattlord", "date": "2026-02-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would encourage you to look at the code and read the documentation", "excerpt": "It's open source. If you really want to know these things, I would encourage you to look at the code and read the documentation. As noted in the blog post, reverse vreplication is setup when you switch. You can switch back and forth and nothing is lost. https://github.com/vitessio/vitess https://vitess.io/docs/reference/vreplication/ \"isn't this just pushing the same issue forward in time?\" I don't understand what yo", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Zero downtime migrations at Petabyte scale"}, {"id": 753460640, "item_id": 47091290, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091290", "by": "mattlord", "date": "2026-02-20", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It's open source. If you want to understand exactly how, you certainly can! :-)", "excerpt": "It's open source. If you want to understand exactly how, you certainly can! :-) https://github.com/vitessio/vitess https://vitess.io/docs/reference/vreplication/ https://vitess.io/docs/reference/features/vtgate-buffering/", "context": "", "use_case": "MySQL sharding and migrations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Zero downtime migrations at Petabyte scale"}, {"id": 753307456, "item_id": 47081716, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47081716", "by": "mattlord", "date": "2026-02-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's open source. You can get as many details as you like :)", "excerpt": "It's open source. You can get as many details as you like :) https://github.com/vitessio/vitess https://vitess.io/docs/reference/vreplication/ https://vitess.io/docs/reference/features/vtgate-buffering/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Zero downtime migrations at Petabyte scale"}, {"id": 751319025, "item_id": 46957439, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46957439", "by": "tibbar", "date": "2026-02-10", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Here\u2019s a post from 2021 about the migration! [0] I guess 2021 is a long time ago now. How did that happen\u2026 [0] https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/partitioning-githubs-relational-databases-scale/", "context": "", "use_case": "Database sharding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Another GitHub outage in the same day"}, {"id": 751301456, "item_id": 46956341, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46956341", "by": "akshayshah", "date": "2026-02-09", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "GitHub pretty famously used Vitess", "excerpt": "I\u2019d be surprised by this: GitHub pretty famously used Vitess, and I\u2019d be surprised if each shard were too big for modern hardware. Based on previous reporting [0], they\u2019re running out of space in the main data center and new management is determined to move to Azure in a hurry. I\u2019d bet that these outages are a combination of a worsening capacity crunch in the old data center and\u2026well, Azure. [0]: https://thenewstack.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Another GitHub outage in the same day"}]}