Engineering Insights

Three surprising benefits of sharding a MySQL database

Organizations often shard their database to scale beyond what simply adding resources to a single server can provide. When you horizontally shard your database, you essentially break the data up and split it across multiple database servers. Hearing this, you might think that adding more servers means adding more maintenance overhead to your staff, and more expenses on your budget, with the tradeoff that your organization can handle more database traffic. While there is definitely some truth to

OpenAI announces leadership transition

How to scale a large codebase

Scaling a codebase is an integral, and inevitable, part of growing a software company. You may have heard many terms thrown around as answers — monoliths, monorepos, micro frontends, module federation, and more. At Vercel, we’ve helped evolve their codebases, and we have an opinion on the optimal way to build software.thousands of large organizations Read more

MySQL replication: Best practices and considerations

MySQL offers a wide array of options to configure replication, but with all of those options, how can you be sure you are doing it right? Replication is the first step to providing a higher level of availability to your MySQL database. A well configured replication architecture can be the difference between your data being highly available, or your MySQL setup becoming a management nightmare. At PlanetScale, we support hundreds of thousands of database clusters, all using replication to provide

Node.js 21.2.0 (Current)

A guide to HTML email with Ruby on Rails and Tailwind CSS

Being in someone’s inbox is a privilege. At PlanetScale, we spend a great amount of time and detail making sure we get it right. We recently shipped weekly database report emails. These report emails are sent out weekly to give you an easy way to see database performance, activity, and actionable next steps. In this article, we’ll cover how we built the HTML emails that power our weekly database reports using Ruby on Rails and Tailwind CSS and how we overcame some of the challenges we faced. Thi

Sharding for cost-effective database management

Sharding provides a unique solution that can optimize database cluster performance as well as the infrastructure costs associated with basic database operations.

Partial prerendering: Building towards a new default rendering model for web applications

At this year’s , we discussed the developer and user experience challenges of global delivery of dynamic web applications. How can we fetch data without expensive waterfalls and also deliver content directly from the edge?Next.js Conf The answer to all of these current challenges: Partial Prerendering (PPR). PPR combines ultra-quick static edge delivery with fully dynamic capabilities and we believe it has the potential to become the default rendering model for web applications, bringing togethe