Vitess

Vitess is a MySQL-compatible, cloud-native database system originally built at YouTube to scale MySQL. PlanetScale runs Vitess as a managed service. Core capabilities:

• Horizontal sharding: Built-in sharding transparent to the application — no sharding logic in app code.
• Connection pooling: VTGate multiplexes client connections, scaling concurrent connections far beyond native MySQL limits.
• High availability: Automatic primary failure detection and repair. Resharding and data migrations with near-zero downtime.
• Query rewriting and caching: VTGate rewrites and optimizes queries before routing to shards.
• Schema management: Apply schema changes across all shards consistently, in the background, without disrupting workloads.
• Materialized views and messaging: Cross-shard materialized views and publish/subscribe messaging via VStream.

Key concepts

PlanetScale specifics

• Branching: Git-like database branches for development; deploy requests for production schema changes.
• Connections: MySQL protocol, port 3306 (direct) or 443 (serverless). SSL always required.

SQL compatibility

Vitess supports nearly all MySQL syntax — most applications work without query changes. Standard DML, DDL, joins, subqueries, CTEs (including recursive CTEs as of v21+), window functions, and common built-in functions all work as expected.

Known limitations:

• Stored procedures / triggers / events: Not supported through VTGate.
• LOCK TABLES / GET_LOCK: Not supported through VTGate.
• SELECT ... FOR UPDATE: Works within a single shard; cross-shard locking is not atomic.
• Cross-shard joins: Supported but expensive (scatter-gather). Filter by vindex column for single-shard routing.
• Correlated subqueries: May fail or perform poorly cross-shard. Rewrite as joins when possible.
• AUTO_INCREMENT: Sequences are per-shard. Use vindexes or app-generated IDs (UUIDs, snowflake) to avoid collisions on sharded tables.
• Aggregations on sharded tables: GROUP BY/ORDER BY/LIMIT merge in VTGate memory. Large result sets can be slow.
• Foreign keys: Limited support. Prefer application-level referential integrity on sharded keyspaces.

References